John Adams - Wastelands 2

*4*. ANATHEMA; the accursed. [2014-15]

He pushed his sister’s head off his shoulder. She slapped his arm. Her eyes were still closed.

“Quit it.”

“You’re hot,” he said.

“I’m not, Branden,” she said.

“You’re heavy.”

Mom talked with adults in the chairs near the corner. Three men and a woman. They were strangers. He didn’t understand why she trusted them all of a sudden.

“When we leaving?” his sister asked. She put her elbow on the armrest and used her hand for a pillow.

“Be right back, Shannon.”

Mom and the adults shook and nodded their heads at each other. All talked at the same time. Their arms swirled and chopped at the air. Their fingers pointed to interrupt.

“…if we’re sick? We get outta here, we’ll just make everybody sick and spread it—”

“But there’s no reason to know that we are. We won’t make it if we don’t leave—”

“Go to the media. There’s got to be a reporter following a storm here.”

“You’re crazy,” Mom said. “I’m sure they’re outside somewhere, on high ground.”

“Why’d you tell us if you don’t expect us to do anything?”

“I’m confused about the options,” Mom said.

“Only one option we—”

“Mom?”

A shock spread through all five of them. Like the worst secret in the world got told and everybody was gonna get in trouble for it. They were scared. Adults. In a panic.

Mom jumped from her seat and grabbed his hand. “I need you to go wait with Shannon.” Her eyes were shiny. The little lines around her mouth got deeper.

“Is that man dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are we sick?”

She didn’t say anything for a moment. “I don’t know.”

Branden tried to free his hand from hers. She shuddered and let him go. “Please, just wait with your sister. Don’t tell her. Don’t tell anybody.”

His chest itched. The itch crawled all over his stomach and his arms. He scratched, but he knew it wouldn’t go away. Whatever that man had, whatever those weird doctors asked him about, he had it, too. He wanted to get away from here. But did he want to give the rest of the world this ? It jumped onto him from that man. And it would jump from him to person to person to person until everybody on the planet died.

“You know you’re not supposed to be in grown-up’s business,” Shannon said.

“Stay away from me!” he said.

Shannon rolled her eyes. She crossed her arms and looked at Mom.

“I’m sorry,” Branden said. He sat next to Shannon, but he pulled his arms and legs close to his body.

All the adults came together. Branden watched them get angry and sad. Some of them cried. They hugged. Then they tore pieces of paper and handed them around. They all wrote on the bits of paper and handed them to an old Latino man. They talked some more, and the next thing Branden knew, Mom got him and Shannon and told them to stay with the other kids no matter what.

The quiet boredom in the room was gone. Branden immediately wanted it back. The men picked up couches. They ran towards the exits with them and rammed them into the doors. Shannon wrapped her arms around Branden’s neck. Kids cried for their parents. They huddled into each other and screamed with each bang . Adults shouted directions at each other. They told their children to stop yelling because everything was going to be okay.

Hot breath and tears slid under his collar. Hair got in his mouth as kids held onto him and rubbed their faces on his shirt. The sickness hopped from person to person, and it wouldn’t matter if they got out of the building or not, if they got away from the storm. Mom watched them bust the doors open. She rubbed her chin when the chains fell, staring out with that same look she had when the man in the backseat started to shiver.

The adults grabbed tables and chairs and pounded through the doors. They pulled their kids from the pack crying in the corner and threw them over their shoulders or ran so hard they dragged them across the floor.

“Mom!” Shannon said.

She turned to them and frowned. “Hurry! Stay with me.”

Outside the waiting room, furniture crashed through windows. The hallways burst in shards. Mom pressed Branden and Shannon to her sides, hunched over them and kept them near the back of the group. “Shouldn’t have told them. Shouldn’t have told them,” she said to herself.

Parents pushed their kids through the windows. But their clothes and skin snagged on the glass. Some pounded on the walls until the walls turned red. “Don’t look don’t look don’t look don’t look!” Mom said, and they fell to their knees at the sound of heavy boots.

“Don’t make me go through the window!” Shannon screamed, and she cried.

Men with thudding voices yelled in the halls. They said they’d shoot. They said to get down. They said to move back in the room, and Branden heard their fists hit cheeks and chins.

“Were they gonna shoot us anyway?” he said.

“Just get down,” Mom said. “Just stay here.”

“ Were they ?” Branden said.

“I don’t know.”

“We’re not sick. They have to let us go,” Shannon said. “Make them, Mom.”

“We are sick. We’re gonna kill people. But I don’t wanna stay. Should we stay?”

“Mom—” Shannon said, but Mom was staring down the hall at the men with guns. She mouthed something to herself. Her lips moved faster than the words could make sense.

She pressed them to the floor. Then she bowed her head, too. With his eyes tight to the floor, not seeing anything, he heard Mom say, “I thought it was important, that’s all. You didn’t need to see it. We wouldn’t have changed… We make it out of here, you take care of you. Can’t be any other way.”

He thought the adults had figured it out. He thought Mom told them what they should do. He wanted her to say we’re sick, but we can still live . But he lied to himself. He wondered why you take care of you couldn’t keep her from giving that man a ride.

Branden shivered again. He wasn’t sure if the sickness made him do it, or Mom’s fear rubbing up against him. But the cold and wet tickled his scalp, and he knew it was the wind bringing the rain through the broken windows.

Five years after her husband died, two years after she moved to a cabin in Montana, and six months after the world ended, Marie opened her curtains to discover her front garden overrun with roving, stumbling advertisements. Marie hadn’t seen one since she’d sold her condo and moved out to her isolated cabin. She shuddered.

There were at least twenty of the ads, and for all it seemed they were doing their damnedest to step lightly, her red and yellow tulips were completely trampled. Marie had stubbornly continued to cultivate those flowers despite the certainty that she ought to be using the gardening space, and the captured rainwater, to grow food. Not that it mattered what she’d been growing there. It was all mud now.

The ad nearest her window looked quite a bit like a tall, lanky teenager. It moved like one as well, and might have fooled her except that its forehead was stuck in price scrolling mode. Faintly glowing red letters crawled across its forehead from right to left.

Marie could only recognize the daffodil bed by memory. She snapped the curtains shut. She wrapped a floral print terrycloth robe around herself and hustled from her sparsely furnished bedroom into the kitchen. She was relieved to see the fences she’d put up to keep the deer out of her vegetable garden, while never quite successful, had at least managed to keep her vegetables safe from the ads.