Emmy Laybourne - Jake and the Other Girl

Missing toddler, please help!

Grandma, I went to Denver. God save us all.

Doreen, I am sorry—I couldn’t wait no more.

And photographs. Photos of the missing and the found and the dead.

The Lewis Palmer Hospital of Monument, Colorado, was papered in flyers.

He got upset, looking at those walls. Anyone would. It was a small town and there were people he knew up there.

Jake saw a kid from the JV team. His biology teacher in a photo with her small children. That suspiciously cheerful waitress from the Village Inn. There was Dean and Alex’s family: We didn’t die. Stay safe or get to Denver.

And there was Lindsay Morrow.

There she was, in a family snapshot, taken at the beach. A 5 x 7 pulled out of a frame, taped onto a piece of notebook paper. Along the bottom was Lindsay’s handwriting with an arrow pointing to the middle-aged woman in the center of the shot: If you see this woman please call —then her phone number. And: Mommy, come home!

He shouldn’t linger on the photo like this. Alex had strapped a video walkie-talkie to his chest and all the kids were watching his every move and listening to his voice.

Astrid could be watching.

The kids were all watching “Jake TV” and waiting for him to come back to the Greenway, where they’d been holed up since the spill.

They’d given him a mission—find out if the hospital was open. It wasn’t.

Nothing was open.

The town had been divided and conquered. If the government wanted any proof that the chemical warfare compounds they’d been cooking up at NORAD worked, well, here it was, papered on the walls of the hospital.

The compounds attacked people differently depending on their blood types. Type As blistered and died, Os turned into bloodthirsty savages, ABs suffered from paranoid delusions and Bs, like Jake, were fine. Showed no effects. Except that they became impotent and infertile.

Thanks, NORAD.

Jake brought Lindsay chocolate every time. It was their thing. Not like payment, of course. That would be gross. It was just a little gesture, is all.

He’d leave school at the lunch bell, or maybe a little before, and stop at Walgreens. A Hershey’s King Size, or, even better, something seasonal—a Cadbury Creme Egg or a marshmallow Santa or a Valentine’s assortment with Timmy Traindawg on it or something. He’d bring the chocolate to her house and she’d take the chocolate and they’d do it.

Lindsay was only a sophomore, but he didn’t feel like he was taking advantage. She was the one in charge, no question. She was in control at lunchtime.

Sometimes she’d smoke, after, which he found kind of shocking, actually.

“Ever heard of lung cancer?” he’d joked once.

“Ever heard of loser?” she had shot back, one eyebrow arched in a way that made him feel stupid and little-boyish.

Her fifteen was a lot more jaded than his eighteen. Well, so what, let her be cooler than him—he was getting laid. He’d put up with any amount of drama or scorn, if a girl would let him in.

He remembered laying on her bed, it covered with some kind of white cotton material with these little designs in it, punched out and in a pattern. Real pretty.

She was pretty too, really pretty, with her long black-brown hair falling all over the pillow and her shoulders and on the creamy lines of her neck and bare chest.

He was supposed to turn around now and go back to the Greenway.

The thought of trudging back there, crossing the black parking lot with the car corpses rusted and molded over, climbing back up the chintzy metal home fire escape ladder, trudging back into the store to tell the bad news to their small, tense, dirty faces—it made Jake feel like cutting his wrists.

Their disappointed faces. Always disappointed.

No.

Jake removed the video walkie-talkie and dropped it on the ground.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, guys,” he told them.

He started ripping off the wires from the front of his jacket.

“I’m not … I’m not coming back. I can’t do it anymore.”

It was true.

One more day in there would kill him. He was sure of it. That feeling of being trapped, penned in, everyone so freakin’ responsible all the time and Astrid watching him. Her eyes telling him he was a failure.

“Tell Astrid I’m sorry,” he said, and that was that.

He was free.

It would be a walk. Lindsay lived near the high school. It was what had made their noontime forays feasible. But if there was anyone who could get him up again, it was Lindsay Morrow. Just seeing her body in her bathing suit on the photo had almost done it for him.

Astrid had always been on to him and Lindsay, anyway, probably. Astrid was the one who said their thing was an open thing. She had insisted on it.

He did feel bad about leaving Brayden, when he was injured, but Niko would take care of him. Niko knew first aid. Brayden would understand. If Brayden had been with him, no way would he have wanted to go back to the store, with the stupid rules and the heavy atmosphere. The heavy freaking everything.

Jake put his hand to his pocket, checking. Under the four extra layers of clothing Niko had insisted he wear, he could feel the bulge in his back pocket. Obezine. Extended release. Thank God for Pharmaceuticals.

Yeah, he used them to brace him up somewhat. They made him feel good. In such dark times, who couldn’t use some extra lift?

Jake turned off his headlamp. No need to draw attention to himself. Could be a type O lurking anywhere, and type Os were monsters. He headed up Highway 105. Kept to the middle, when cars weren’t in the way. But he had to go over the overpass. It was wedged solid with cars.

Edging sideways along one, he brushed up against the weird white mold growing up from the tires on one of the cars. What was this stuff?

It covered the tires of every car and then blew up and over, like a snowdrift.

A side effect of one of the compounds, or maybe a different compound that had been released at the same time as the blood type one and the blackout cloud. Ate up car tires so no one could get anywhere.

Jake pressed his finger into the foam blowing up over the hood of a Toyota Venza, maybe 2019? Silver.

He rubbed it between his fingers and it melted into an oily stain on his glove. Then Jake saw past the foam, inside the car, and he couldn’t look away fast enough. Brown streaks of blood crusted to the windshield and driver’s window. A corpse there, old meat and bone. Type A. He edged past the side window, rolled down, and maybe, maybe there was the dried-out form of a baby strapped into a car seat but who could know for sure. He got away and fast.

Edging, edging, edging sideways past the cars with their dead until he was off the overpass and then he ran.

It felt good to run and it was safer, right?

He didn’t need the fleece balaclava ski mask Niko had made him put on. It was stupid—the OTHER blood types needed protection. For type Bs the damage was already done.

He took off the stupid fleece job and could see a bit better in the darkness.

He had worn the five layers of clothing they had recommended on the news because Niko insisted and because it had made Astrid and the little kids feel better about him going out. Now he realized he didn’t want those things either.

Jake stripped off the sweatpants, the sweatshirts, throwing them onto someone’s dead shrubs and getting giddy with the freedom.