The Loudness Page 28

  Despite our misgivings, we followed. Ava jumped ahead, almost keeping pace with Mr. Malgré, but I held back with Mom and Dad, too nervous to leave their side after . . .

  After having lost them.

  I didn’t want to think about that, though. And I didn’t want to think about that federale car, either, or the head of Mr. Malgré’s square shadow, which was cast ominously onto our feet by a rising sun. The oak trees lining the Avenue shivered in a hot breeze, their leaves whispering in anticipation of the carefree calls of early birds. Unthinkingly, I wrapped my hands into Mom and Dad’s, squeezing thankfully. They’d looked at me with wide eyes, startled for a moment by my buzzing fingers—then squeezing back. Soon we fell into the quiet rhythm of the Green, punctuated occasionally by derelict cars and streetlights fuzzing on as we approached them and fading out again in our wake.

  “Hank,” Ava had shouted after a few minutes of walking, beckoning me forward with an exaggerated wave. “C’mere a sec!”

  I was hesitant to leave my parents so soon after having been reunited, but Dad nudged me forward with an encouraging pat. It felt good to be in the Zone again, jogging past the construction equipment on the springy black asphalt of the freshly paved Avenue. Closing my eyes, it was almost possible to pretend nothing had happened.

  Except . . .

  I could feel the difference in how effortlessly I ran, carving through the humid morning like a knife through water, eyes closed as if I was dreaming. When I opened them, exhilarated but not winded, I was met with the shadowed specter of Mr. Malgré, leading us through the Zone as if we’d been gone for decades instead of days.

  “What do you think?” Ava whispered as I sidled up next to her. I could hear my parents arguing indistinctly behind us; when I turned around, Dad smiled and waved, but Mom still looked upset . . . until he squeezed her hand and, looking up, she saw me and smiled. “You don’t think this is, like, a trap or anything, do you?”

  My parents raised their voices again, and then lowered them sheepishly when I looked back a second time. More than the federale car or Mr. Malgré’s general untrustworthiness, that made me wonder if Ava’s hunch was right. A steamroller parked on the side of the road turned quietly on and then off as we passed it. If it was a trap, I could do my thing again; bring down the sky and escape. The problem was, we didn’t really have any place to escape to . . .

  Aware of our limited options, I eyed Mr. Malgré as if for the first time. “I dunno,” I finally said. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t trust him,” she’d whispered, conspiratorial despite the distance between us and Malgré. “Let’s go back to the Library, or the Other Side. Anywhere but after him.”

  “What about Ben?” I’d mouthed back, the words barely leaving my lips. “My parents?”

  “Listen,” Ava had said. “I’ll just make a run for it, then. If anyone’s there, I’ll let them know you’re with Malgré.”

  I nodded, distracted by my parents, who were lost in a distant, heated conversation. No matter how hard I focused, I couldn’t make out what they were saying. It was all lost in the rustling leaves and singing birds I’d found so comforting just a few minutes before.

  “If anything happens,” she’d said, squeezing my wrist. “I’ll find you, okay?”

  I nodded again, turning toward Ava, whose face was suddenly so close to mine that my eyes wouldn’t focus. About halfway through our kiss, which was quick and hard, my parents finally stopped arguing. I pulled reflexively away to check if they’d seen us, and she was gone, sprinting nimbly across the street and disappearing into an overgrown garden hedge.

  A warm blush spread up my neck and across my face from my buzzing chest as I considered jumping after her into the bushes to avoid Mom and Dad’s smirks. But the moment passed before I could take it, and instead of following Ava out of Mr. Malgré’s trap, I was facing my mother, whose mouth was agape, and my father, whose ear-to-ear grin was just as bad.

  “She, uh,” I said, backtracking bashfully toward my parents. “She had to go.”

  “Yeah,” said Dad, unsuccessfully stifling a laugh, Mom still speechless at his side. “Should we wait for her?”

  “Wait for who?” Mr. Malgré asked, casually spitting onto a cracked cement curb of the old university campus where Dad taught. “We moved headquarters from the Library to here,” he said, waving at the grey stone walls with one hand by way of explanation and wiping spittle from his lip with the back of the other. “After Moonie got took.”

  My stomach sank as the grin disappeared from Dad’s face. Malgré didn’t seem to care, though—about Freckles or Moonie—as he hitched up his filthy khakis and led us through an imposing stone archway. “We’ll talk about this later,” Mom whispered, squeezing my shoulder and nodding sharply back at where Ava had made her escape. “About that.”

  “More defensible here,” Mr. Malgré said as we entered the grassy quad, smiling terribly. I’d expected to see something like the City on the other side of the arch—a sea of refugees packed safely within the thick, strong walls of the university. But instead, there was nothing. Just a row of carelessly parked cars on the far side of the quad, most of which seemed to be federale sedans. “Prisoners,” said Mr. Malgré, sensing the sudden tension rippling through our party.

  “What?” Mom, glowering, stopped in her tracks. “Federale prisoners?”

  But Mr. Malgré had already moved on, disappearing under another stone archway on the far side of the quad, leaving me and Mom and Dad to jog after him. While I scanned the rows of tall windows staring blankly down at us, looking for peeking eyes and flashes of movement that never came, Mom and Dad lost themselves in quiet argument about the very idea of prisoners in the Green. I tried to eavesdrop, without much success, until Mr. Malgré stopped unexpectedly, surprising Mom in the middle of a whispered screed. All three of us looked around, as if dreaming, at a tidy, familiar front porch rimmed with intricate gingerbread woodwork and clusters of blue hydrangeas still glistening with dew from the night before.

  “You got a problem with the prisoners,” Mr. Malgré said to Mom, his face stretched into another sinister smile. “You can take it up with her.” Mom didn’t wait for his permission, pushing by him so quickly that he lost his balance and teetered heavily at the top of the stairs, the door slamming open behind him.

  “Mill-y,” she yelled, angrily prolonging the y as she stomped through every room of the house, looking for Grammy with me and Dad in her wake. “Mildred Lo-ong.”

  It didn’t take long for Mom to find her, sitting quietly at the kitchen table like the last time I’d come looking for her, hands crossed contemplatively in her lap. Low-watt bulbs flickered dully to life as I walked into the room, while a walkie-talkie crackled and spat in front of her, its black metal worn silver in places from use. Far from looking chastened, a coy smile flashed across her powdered face—in fact, she seemed delighted by the electronics buzzing awkwardly to life around her.

  “Sarah Long,” Grammy said, her voice kind and . . . normal. Like nothing had changed in the Green Zone. “You may be acting mayor, but I am not Mildred to you. You just call me Mama.” With that, she got up and hugged Mom tightly, and then Dad.

  And then me.

  “Our little rebel,” she’d said, as her trademark pearl earrings grazed my ear, cold to the touch. When she pulled away, her eyes locked with mine. “I won’t say I wasn’t mad you left, and mad at Tom, too. I heard what you did, though,” she’d whispered, pointing back at the sputtering walkie-talkie on the table with a heavily ringed hand and then pinching my cheeks. “It’s good you went.”

  “They got the helicopter,” Mr. Malgré interrupted from the doorway, his sneer noticeably absent. “Ben Wallace’ll move it to the quad when he’s patched.”

  Grammy looked quickly up from me to Mr. Malgré, her pale face darkened with long shadows as she released my cheeks. “You’re dismissed, Malgré,” she’d snapped, the strained goodwill of our reunion draining out of the room as
the walkie-talkie crackled to life.

  zcht—No reason to—zcht—Stop them, Cap’n—zcht—Better out than—

  Jerking back toward the kitchen table, Grammy clutched the walkie-talkie in her bejeweled hands; fiddling with its dials as if her life depended on it. “It was coming in clearer . . .” she’d hissed, slamming the sputtering radio back down on the table in frustration while shooting me an unmistakably accusatory look. “. . . before.”

  I backed out into the hallway, behind Dad.

  “What’s going on?” Mom asked, fully recovered from the shock of seeing Grammy like this. “What do you know? We saw the cars. Malgré said you have . . .”

  She could barely bring herself to say it.

  “Guests?” Grammy looked up from the walkie-talkie, smiling sweetly again. “They were making us nervous, Sarah, those federales. After they took you and the others, and then Henry disappeared, too . . .” She jangled her wrists in my direction by way of coy explanation. “Well, some of our bigger boys were nice enough to return the favor.”

  “But,” Mom said, backing nervously out into the hallway with me and Dad. “Prisoners?”

  “Oh, Sarah, don’t be such a prude,” Grammy spat, her sweetness instantly gone. “We took some radios and a few cars. We leveled the playing field one tiny bit.” You leveled their power plant, I thought, but I didn’t say anything as the walkie-talkie crackled to life again, its reception clearer with me huddled safely in the hallway.

  Repeat—zcht—evacuation in progress—zcht—evacuation in progress—

  “Besides,” Grammy said, smiling again, “you started something bigger than us. The City’s been emptying out since you left so . . . dramatically. It sounds like we’re gonna have a lot more guests soon, so you better get used to ’em.”

  The Pickers started showing up a few days afterward, true to Grammy’s prediction, sun-bleached from their travels and telling stories of freak blizzards and scrambling federales. I was stuck at home, so didn’t see them, but I heard news in bits and pieces—as murmurs floating up through the creaking floorboards of my bedroom, my ears pressed against the cool, dark wood. They were flooding into the Grey Zone, more every day.

  And not just Pickers, either.

  Evacuees from the City proper, and even—if the living room reports could be believed—some federales, like Ben, who I hadn’t seen since Mr. Malgré’s men carted him off. To be fair, I hadn’t seen anyone except my parents since we’d left Grammy’s house. Instead, I stayed in my room and peeled the protective aluminum covering off of all my old stuff, crumpling it up into an enormous ball that I tossed from hand to glowing hand. Dad came up when he could, trying to piece together everything that happened while he and Mom were federale prisoners. But no matter how many times I told the story, he just couldn’t seem to wrap his rational mind around it.

  “So, one more time,” he’d say, shaking his head in disbelief while counting the impossibilities on his hairy fingers. “Carel the chef blew up their power plant, and you think he was hired by Grammy. And, when the power plant blew up, you . . . think you got its power?”

  I’d just shrug and steeple my fingers. My new game was to touch my fingertips together, building up a charge, and then pull them slowly apart until the connection finally broke, jagged white wires of electricity snapping back into my hands like popped rubber bands. By the fourth or fifth time I tried to explain everything to Dad, I could get my hands about two feet apart before the connection snapped.

  Without fail, Mom would call Dad back downstairs before we were done talking. There was always something happening, something she needed consultation on. Most of the time they argued about when the federales were going to recover from Carel’s attack and storm the Green Zone, taking us by force. Dwarfing Malgré’s impromptu defenses and exacting revenge for our federale prisoners. From what I could hear through the floorboards, they weren’t fun conversations . . . but whenever he was called into one, Dad would get up with creaking knees and, pausing in the doorway, say something apologetic like, “We’ll get this sorted, kiddo.”

  I didn’t need anybody’s apologies, though, and I didn’t need sorting.

  I was just . . .

  I don’t know, restless.

  My entire body was on pins and needles, my muscles flexing and ready to go . . . only, there was nothing to do. Mom had her secret meetings downstairs, and both she and Dad had made it clear that they didn’t want me out of the house, not after everything that had happened. I didn’t want to be separated from them, either . . . but after a few days in my bedroom, I couldn’t take it anymore.

  Just for something to do, I unplugged every power cord in my room—lights, record player, alarm clock—and watched in quiet wonder as nothing changed. The previously aluminum-wrapped lamps continued to cast tall shadows on the wall; the flickering red time stamp on the alarm clock advanced a minute, and then another. I watched in quiet wonder for a while, and then—bored—picked up Tom’s guitar, wrapping buzzing fingers around its dusty neck, and strummed experimentally.

  Even unplugged, it shrieked with feedback, and—startled—I tossed it onto my unmade bed.

  Mostly, though, I laid on the cool wood floor and eavesdropped while idly spinning an increasingly hot light bulb between my thumb and forefinger, its filament whitening and then melting, leaving the sizzling bulb suddenly dark. Downstairs, the front door slammed shut as one of my parents’ “little spies”—Dad’s words—was ushered out, then quickly opened again as Mom’s voice carried up to the second floor. “He’s fine,” she’d said. “Still recovering. I’ll tell him you came, sweetheart.”

  I ran to the window, leaving the dying light bulb spinning on the floor as Ava walked dejectedly away, Conor and Ben at her side. Ben’s entire shoulder and right arm was wrapped in thick white plaster, but his left was draped around his younger brother’s shoulder. I was happy to see them reunited, and wondered how long it had been since they’d last seen each other. Ten years, probably. Maybe even more.

  I hadn’t seen Ava since she’d run off into the Green, and thought maybe—

  But that didn’t matter.

  She’d come.

  I took the stairs five at a time, slipping dangerously in my worn socks and banging against the already battered wall at every landing. “Hank, baby,” Mom said, blocking the doorway with a wooden frame stretched with rough canvas. “Do you know what this is?” She’d angled the painting toward me, and it was all I could do to stop myself from barreling through it. Sliding to a stop across the slick wood floors, an excited smile stretched across my cheeks—my first since being home. It was Rachel, her face comprised of a thousand shimmering strokes of color—acrylic smile radiating through darkness of the foyer as if the painting itself was alive.

  As if she was trying to tell me something.

  “Ava brought this?”

  I was so surprised I could barely get the words out. As impossible as it seemed, there was only one place I could think of where she could have gotten it. The foyer lights flickered overhead as the ghost of that morning on the Other Side—when Conor and Ava and I had seen the painting for the first time—came back and shook me by the shoulders, sending goosebumps down my arms.

  “Hank,” Mom said, exasperated, as I made to angle past her toward the door. “I just don’t think you’re ready to be out there. It’s like the Wild West, and you’re . . .”

  I was in my pajamas still, had been in them for days: a pair of fading flannel boxers and socks that hung loosely around my ankles, the elastic stretched far past the point of no return. As Mom stood in the foyer crinkling her nose at my buzzing chest, I felt self-conscious about my shirtlessness for the first time in days. There was no way to tell her that I liked the way the wood felt against my stomach when I lay pressed against the floor; cold, at first, but somehow connective. Like I could feel the house sighing heavily beneath me as it inhaled my parents’ guests and then exhaled them out again, full from their company.

 
Instead, I just crossed my arms, covering myself as best as I could.

  “You know?” Mom said in conclusion, never having finished her thought. “We’re opening the dam again. Your grandmother started a war. Who knows what could happen . . .” As she continued through a list of possible catastrophes, I tried to pin down the last time I’d seen that painting.

  We’d left it in Carel’s truck!

  By all rights, it should still be there, where Carel left it. But instead, it’s in front of me, propped casually between Mom’s hands as she recounts in grisly detail how the engineer had fallen from the dam that time, totally unexpected, and how those kind of accidents happen all the time. That you can’t plan for them, and that’s why we call them—

  “. . . accidents,” Mom said, her voice raising. “Henry Long, are you even listening to me?”

  “I love you . . .” I’d said, running back up the stairs as quickly as I’d jumped down them. “But I have to go.”

  “We’re powering up, baby,” she’d shouted after me as I flung myself into my bedroom from two well-worn banister knobs. “Anything could happen.” I smiled as I pulled a shirt over my head, thrusting my white-hot hands through the holes where my sleeves used to be.

  That was exactly what I was counting on.

  The Hospital had been my idea.

  Truthfully, it had been my only way out. All those hours lying in my room, bored—I just thought I was depressed. That the shock of everything that had happened in the City was catching up with me. I hadn’t realized I was a prisoner in my own house until I’d gotten back downstairs and Mom was still blocking the door.

  “Baby,” she’d said, her voice ominously soft. “You can’t leave—there are prisoners, strangers. People are missing. It’s just . . . it’s too dangerous.”

  I met her eye and raised my glowing hand, casting a weak light across the dim foyer, illuminating Rachel’s painting, which leaned face-down against the wall behind her. “But,” I’d said, the light intensifying alongside my racing pulse. “I can help; I can . . .”