A Catch in Time Read online

  In the tight darkness, he grabbed Lucas in a fierce hug.

  And that contact gave John Thomas a taste of what he’d craved. Desperate for the comfort of being protected by someone older and bigger, he felt comforted holding someone younger, smaller.

  He imagined his father’s approval and it seemed almost as though his father sat beside him, smiling at him. Proud of him.

  Lucas suffered the hug in silence. As long as John Thomas hugged him, he wouldn’t be leaving the closet and letting the grown-ups in. His ear, squashed against his brother’s chest, filled with the erratic beat of John Thomas’s heart.

  It was wearying, this deep restructuring that went on inside John Thomas. His traumatized brain, reacting in defense, began to relax. Though he tried to keep his muscles poised and his ears alert, his heart rate and adrenal system slowed.

  And while John Thomas waited in the darkness for the danger to pass, Lucas, crushed into a tiny space beside him, sat patiently, every sense keen.

  Without warning, the headache that for days had throbbed behind John Thomas’s eyes suddenly coalesced into a spear of bright pain. He cried out, covered his eyes, and slumped against Lucas as the pain exploded.

  CHAPTER 9

  ELI PARKED THE TRUCK FACING MARKET STREET and set the brake. They had to cross Market to get to the warehouse and it didn’t look like that was going to be easy.

  Reaching for the mask that would help filter out dust and odors, he looked at the chaos ahead. Market Street, deep in the downtown section of the city, had always been snarled in traffic. But it now looked more like a war zone with its burned-out buildings and gas-line explosions.

  No doubt other routes to the warehouse were as bad. He set his mask in place and nodded to Josiah.

  Josiah was ready. They both stepped out into a street filled with the twisted debris of cars, glass, and blackened building rubble. Decaying bodies sprawled amongst the wreckage, limbs poking from every niche. And rats. Everywhere.

  The new addition, Alex, scrambled out of the backseat as he adjusted his mask, then jammed his cap on. He’d considered walking away but knew he was lucky to have hooked up with Eli and Josiah. He felt safe with them. People were acting weird, like they’d been bitten by some shit-crazed bug.

  Two boxes, one packed with surgical gloves, the other with heavy work gloves, were in the bed of the pickup. The three of them struggled with the tight surgical gloves, then pulled work gloves on over them.

  A group of people a block to their left were already at work near a large burn pile. Two men heaved a corpse atop the pile. Eli looked away. After two days of rain, followed by two days of sunshine, the stink of decomposing bodies was overwhelming, even through the mask.

  Many misshapen corpses weren’t whole, their discolored, shriveled flesh gnawed by scavenging animals. There was no place where his gaze didn’t fall on rotting flesh hanging from splintered bone. The maggots were the worst; fat, burrowing. A gag constricted his throat as he asked Josiah where they should begin.

  “That blue truck,” Josiah said. “If we can crank it over behind that bus, we can probably move those compacts. They look locked together.” He moved to the front of their truck, unlatched the winch, and took the hook to the blue truck, cable unraveling behind him.

  Alex impatiently watched Josiah kneel and grope beneath the wrecked vehicle for a place to hook the winch. “Hey, Eli,” he finally said, “two-man job, huh? I’ll be back.”

  Eli nodded and watched Alex saunter toward the other group. Poor kid, he thought. When they’d taken Alex home that night the men attacked them, Alex had aroused Eli’s sympathies.

  He was a runaway from New Jersey but hadn’t yet told Eli his reasons for leaving home. He had no way of knowing if his parents had survived, or if he’d ever manage to get back home.

  Eli wondered again why Josiah wasn’t curious about what had prompted Alex to leave home at seventeen. Josiah seemed to be indifferent to Alex. Not that Alex seemed to notice. He’d taken a real liking to Josiah and was constantly asking his opinion, although that wasn’t unusual; Josiah looked like a man with answers. He had that air about him.

  In his heavy work boots, one of the perks of a city full of abandoned stores, Eli glanced down the street after carefully picking his way over the rubble to Josiah.

  Several burn piles, hidden by wreckage but distinguishable by their smoke, smoldered in the distance. People poked among the rubble, dodged around wrecks, or disappeared into, and appeared out of, the businesses that lined Market. Chaotic noise, voices, shouts, rumbling engines, the screech of metal, and the crunch of glass filled the air.

  Just as he reached Josiah, he heard a high-pitched roar as three military jets came in low from the east, flying in formation, and passed like thunder. Along the street, faces turned upward and followed the wake of the formation. Some cheered, others yelled in outrage.

  Most of the people Eli had talked to thought the government was involved with the disaster; had either instigated it or been unsuccessful in averting it. As always, people assumed the government knew more than it was saying.

  A block away, a man raised his arms and shouted for attention, then began a loud singsong sermon. A few people drifted his way, including Alex.

  “I wonder what it looks like from up there,” Josiah said. He searched the sky.

  Eli squatted next to him. “Pretty bad,” he ventured, “but not as bad as it looks and smells from the ground.”

  Josiah showed Eli the problem he was having. The locking lip had skewed itself out from under the tip of the hook and was now useless. There was nothing to keep the hook from slipping. Under the tremendous force of both the winch and the truck, a suddenly released hook could be disastrous.

  Josiah watched Eli examine the hook. He held it close to his face, looking down his nose at it. He looked cross-eyed, and Josiah laughed. It reminded him of Bob. His laugh subsided into a bemused smile. He hadn’t thought of Bob in years.

  “What’s so funny?” grinned Eli.

  Yeah, Josiah thought. Just like Bob. He’d always been ready to join in, too. And had always known, like Eli, that Josiah wasn’t laughing at him. He considered telling Eli about Bob, an old, yellow Big Bird doll that he’d bought from a thrift shop when he was nine years old. After his mother had OD’ed. But how to describe what Bob had meant to him, a nine-year-old gangbanger?

  He was about to start, knowing Eli would try to understand, even if he didn’t tell it right, when the pressure of the headache he’d had for days abruptly blossomed into knife-sharp pain. One look told him Eli was experiencing the same thing.

  They both raised their hands to their temples. Josiah saw other people crumple to the ground clutching their heads. He saw terror in Eli’s eyes.

  Nerves on edge, Laura inched the Bronco onto Market Street. Moments before, the truck she’d been following had turned a corner, taillights flashing. The unknown driver had had no qualms about creating a path through the mess; wrecks had shuddered and rocked aside as the truck crashed its way through, with Laura driving in its wake. Now left to make her own way through the wreckage, she nervously adjusted the bandanna covering her nose and mouth.

  Easing the Bronco ahead, she tapped the fender of a car in front of her, a bloated arm dangling from its window. She’d have to ride the sidewalk to avoid the next obstruction.

  Broken bodies lay on a sidewalk stained dark with blood. I can’t drive over them. If Catherine were here to see this, she’d stop demanding that she get to a warehouse before it was emptied.

  “Don’t forget these, Laura,” Catherine had said, handing her both the gun and a shopping list. A shopping list.

  Just a few more measly blocks. They’re dead, just go. Turn that corner and you’re there. She tightened her grip on the wheel.

  The Bronco shot forward as she jumped the curb and rode a path littered with flesh and bones. A last lurch, and she was rolling on a clear stretch of sidewalk. She stopped, her foot shaking uncontrollably on the
brake.

  She leaned against the steering wheel and tried to judge whether a broken lamppost’s angle left enough room for her to squeeze the Bronco between it and the building. To her left, cars blocked the street. Her small car would have made it, but she was unfamiliar with the abandoned Bronco she’d appropriated an hour ago.

  “You won’t be able to fit enough into your car,” Catherine had decided. “You’ll have to find a larger vehicle.”

  “Yeah, Laura,” Kate had drawled from the couch.

  “No time for levity, Kate,” Catherine reprimanded. “Our survival depends on what we can collect in the next few days. People are supplying themselves and fleeing the city. We must do the same, before disease comes.”

  “What’s with the we shit?” Kate had retorted. “Laura’s doing everything.”

  “I am aware of that,” Catherine said icily, turning immediately to Laura. “Don’t hesitate to use the gun.” Then she’d gently patted Laura’s hand, startling a smile from her.

  Laura eased off the brake and edged the Bronco forward, steering close to the building beside her. When the hood moved under the lamppost, she stopped, set the emergency brake, and jumped out to gauge the distance between the Bronco’s roof and the lamppost. There were inches to spare, she decided, nervously aware of the Bronco’s coughing idle. Hurrying back to hit the accelerator and keep the engine going, she was too late. With a protracted belch, the engine died.

  She struck the hood in frustration. This was the third time in an hour it had died.

  Then, to her left, across the street, three young men, their arms filled, emerged from a building and disappeared among the jumbled destruction. There was other scattered activity on the street. Distant voices called out to each other in efforts to push wrecks aside. Scarves, handkerchiefs, masks, or mufflers covered every face she saw, giving all the appearance of refugees.

  She was about to get back into the Bronco when all noise suddenly ceased.

  Clusters of people, active and noisy an instant before, grew still. Everywhere she looked, people clutched their heads and slowly collapsed to the ground.

  What’s wrong with everybody? She pulled herself into the driver’s seat, shut the door, and watched the stricken people. Catherine’s prophecies of disease and plague came fearfully to mind.

  A wail rose thinly, strengthened, became an unbroken scream. Other voices combined in an agony of sound that pierced the air. She clapped her hands to her ears but could not shut out the shrieks of despair. Staring at the wretched people, she feared everyone had gone mad.

  A gaunt man startled her as he emerged unsteadily from behind a smashed bus, not ten paces from her.

  Her breath caught as she stared into his eyes. She’d never seen such bleak anguish. It carried an energy of its own, emotion on the verge of detonation. He screamed from his eyes with a sucking silence more powerful than any voice.

  Compassion beseeched her to do something about his terrible despair. Instead, she froze as he raised a gun, aimed at her.

  Eli moaned as the unbearable pressure in his head increased. Pain stabbed his eyes, his temples. Certain of imminent death, he squeezed his eyes shut. Any second, the throbbing vessels in his head would burst.

  Then it was gone, so quickly and completely that his body jerked. He felt wonder, relief, then something else was in him. Something huge. Black. Terrifying. He sagged, shrinking from inside. Tears swam in his eyes.

  Filled with fear and a despair too large to comprehend, he turned to Josiah, forcing words past trembling lips. “It—it’s like the end of the world, Josiah. Is it—?” His throat constricted, heart seared by desolation. A chasm of lonely sadness suddenly opened beneath his feet.

  “Hold on, Eli, hold on,” Josiah managed to utter past his own swelling despair. He didn’t know what was happening, only knew they must survive.

  “What IS this?” Eli whispered, his face twisted by aguish. “What’s happening?”

  And then the darkness Josiah fought engulfed him. Desolation. Primordial loneliness so fierce, he nearly cried out under its weight. He lost focus on Eli as he braced himself against the hopelessness devouring him, sucking him downward. Fighting to regain control, he tried, as he often had, to will himself not to feel.

  How, he wondered, had he fallen, so quickly, so completely, into this gluey darkness? How? He attached himself to the question like a shipwrecked man clings to a scrap. How had this blackness hidden within him, so concealed, yet so overpowering? How? He repeated it like a mantra, until the horrid blackness dwindled to a vanishing point.

  He was shaken. Nothing in life had prepared him for this. His self was the one strength he had never questioned.

  His self had withstood brutality, poverty, betrayal, and emotional wounds inflicted by his loving/hating mother. Having withstood all that without self-doubt, he’d thought himself inviolable. He had faced his own mortality so often, he’d come to accept it as just as real as being. He accepted his life. He accepted his mortality.

  It had never occurred to him that something else might lie between the two.

  He stared at his hands, their stillness belying the struggle he’d just endured: to keep his soul from being torn from his body even as he still inhabited it. Breathing raggedly, he juggled the paradox. How could he exist without that which defined him?

  The answer jarred him with its simplicity: Madness.

  A state of insanity.

  Relieved to be intact, he was yet numbed by the glimpse of his own madness.

  He became aware of Eli, sitting so quietly near him, pale, his skin stretched over the bones of his face, his eyes shuttered by bruised lids. He’s still there. In that darkness. Carefully, he took Eli’s hands in his own.

  “Hold on, Eli, hold on.” Tightening his grip on Eli’s hands, he felt helpless. He rubbed Eli’s hands. “Hold on, hold on, hold on.”

  “Holding,” Eli’s voice finally came, barely audible. “Holding.” Fingers twitching in Josiah’s grip, Eli’s eyelids fluttered, the lifeline of Josiah’s voice guiding him out of the murk. Trembling, he leaned into his new friend.

  Down the block, Alex lay in agony. Curled around himself on the cold street, he wanted to die, to feel nothing ever again, if that meant being free of the anguish.

  And then a warm hand clutched his shoulder, warm breath filled his ear.

  “Rise, boy, rise up,” a voice demanded. “We got to fight, boy,” the preacher hissed, “for Satan has unleashed his demons upon the world.”

  CHAPTER 10

  LAURA BARELY HAD TIME TO RECOGNIZE THE GUN aimed at her.

  The next instant, the gaunt man with the eyes full of torment placed the muzzle against his own temple.

  Laura’s breath caught in her throat, relief and fear trapped between heartbeats.

  He squeezed the trigger, a tiny motion, just before his head burst outward and his body slumped to the ground, his death painting her world.

  She pressed a hand over her mouth to keep from screaming, certain that someone would now break free of the pall that had befallen them and rush to investigate. But people remained huddled in the chaotic debris, an inversion layer of despair and depression trapping them, thick, unmoving, its weight increasing every moment.

  Shaking, desperate for escape, Laura started the engine, barely hearing it wheeze before it caught. She floored the Bronco, surged under the angled post, and fishtailed onto a four-lane thoroughfare. She wheeled around smashed cars, the wide street bordered by two-story buildings, reasonably free of rubble.

  She almost drove past the warehouse. The entrance bays flashed by on her right, and she hit the brakes hard, tires screeching as she rocked to a stop. After backing up, she nosed the Bronco into the dim street-level garage. Close to the ramp walkway, she killed the engine with a shaky breath. What had just happened to everyone?

  Everyone except me. Her hand went to her stomach, began the familiar, soothing circular motion and, for the first time in weeks, she realized she wasn’t
nauseous.

  She got out of the Bronco and hurried up the walkway, where she saw that the open bay doors in the front of the building did little to light the interior. She stepped into the warehouse, but before her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she realized she wasn’t alone. Several shadowy figures moved in the semi-darkness.

  She grabbed a shopping cart and moved through the gloom as new anxiety struck. No one spoke. There was only the sound of shuffling footsteps, the thud of boxes, the rattle of things dropping into carts. And crying.

  She was frightened by the despair of these people. Words cannot describe this, their features said, do not come at us with pitiful words.

  Like the man who’d shot himself.

  Laura quickened her pace, feeling vulnerable in the gloom. Something was almost recognizable about them. A memory she couldn’t quite grasp. Then a woman, standing motionless by the cereal shelves, seized her arm. Laura cried out and yanked herself free as she whirled to face the woman. And saw bottomless emptiness in her eyes. Laura’s breath caught and she fled. The woman didn’t move.

  Laura was terrified. She wanted to abandon her cart and run, speed home to Catherine and Kate, and never leave again.

  Instead, she forced herself to move through the echoing aisles, snatching items from ransacked shelves. Tossing packs of batteries into her cart, she realized she’d have to tell Kate and Catherine what she knew. They might not believe her, but she had to try to close the gap between what she knew and what others were experiencing.

  Avoiding the ghostly shapes of people, she loaded her cart with flashlights and camping supplies, tools, canned foods, and powdered milk. Her heart pounded. She heaved two fifty-pound sacks of rice onto the lower rack of her cart. She threw in boxes of bandages, packages of soap, bottles of medicine and vitamins, and hurried away as someone entered her aisle. She loaded in bags of dried beans and flour, cans of coffee, and sacks of sugar and potatoes, while nervously keeping her distance from others.