A Better World, page 36
Screaming a wild, terror scream, eyes dangling against his cheeks, he flailed to his back. He didn’t seem to understand what had happened—that his eyes were no longer inside his skull. He could still see, she knew. But with one eye pointing down and left, the other down and right, his mind wasn’t creating a useful picture.
No longer screaming, but whimpering, he reached his hands along his face until he found and cupped his eyes. Now was the time, she knew. She ought to tear them from their nerves, smash him with a rock. Finish it.
She didn’t do these things. She scrambled up, got back near the kids.
He tried in vain to wedge his eyes under their lids and back inside their orbital nests. As he worked, he didn’t weep or keen. He uttered soft, disconsolate whimpers. His breath caught in gulps and gurgles. “Is anyone there?” he begged. “Are you there?”
Linda and the kids stayed still and close.
“Please?”
It was strange. She was tempted to help him. Josie even took a step toward him before Hip caught and held her.
Keith heard the sound and went very still.
Unmoving, they waited. It was a kind of purgatory.
Keith let go of his eyes. His hands moved to the left side of his chest, where his palms stiffened and turned to claws.
A heart attack.
They stayed that way in the silence. She guessed only a few seconds, though it felt longer. Hip broke their paralysis. Having lost all trepidation, all decorum for now and maybe forever, he took his rock and bashed that same bleeding side of Keith’s head with it. Crack! Keith went utterly still.
It’s awful to see your child do something like that. In many ways, they’re no longer your child or anyone’s child, once they’ve committed murder. She felt great compassion for him, and only wished she’d spared him this act, and had done it herself.
More than all of that, she felt relief.
* * *
Panting, the three didn’t take the time to huddle or check injuries. They ran through the nearest hall, marked PARSON PRIVATE QUARTERS, into a suite of rooms. The first room was a library with those same human-skinned chairs. The second was a small bedroom, a low cot, and shining Beltane King costumes on the white tile floor like ragged black holes. Along the faux window shelf, through which an artist had depicted mosaic caladrius, were two rows of Beltane Crowns, the back row stacked halfway over the front one. On the nightstand, a scatter of used hypodermics.
Keith’s private room.
She didn’t pity him. He didn’t deserve that. Still, she felt a pang, imagining him on this cot, alone.
They kept going into the connected room, which was five times bigger and much brighter, its mosaic windows taking up nearly every wall. The bed was sultan-sized and the furniture was all Daniella’s trademark velvet. Each side room led to large dressing rooms and studies. Linda recognized Anouk’s ugly caftan shawl hanging off the side of the bed. She recognized her father Parson’s cane on the other side.
She didn’t think about what all that meant. Now was not the time to care about what had driven Anouk Parson and her son insane.
They kept going through to a solarium with a ceiling made of mirrors. The next room let out to an unexpected place: the stairwell leading down, down, down, to the reactor. The showstopper.
* * *
“Now where?” she croaked, wringing her sticky, wet hands. Then came a wild and hurtling sound that echoed. She could hear a man’s keening, his large body slamming against walls as it tracked them, following light.
Keith Parson came crashing through the doorway. He’d shoved his eyes back into their sockets, but they moved out of synchronicity. He panted, his fingers and lips cyanotic blue, his face bloody and red. She’d seen this before in people right before they died, though she hadn’t expected it now, when Keith had been so badly hurt. Though his pursuit was unwelcome, it at least meant that Hip would not have to carry the burden of having dealt a death blow.
Semiblind and coursing with adrenaline, Keith swung at the air with the indignant fury of a young man whose time has prematurely run out. They were cornered. Josie raced down the clanging metal stairs, so Linda and Hip followed. Flinging blood, shrieking animal sounds of fury, Keith held to the railing.
They had a lead but lost it. Keith jumped from stairwell to stairwell; even as he landed wrong, crunching his ankle, slamming his knees, he seemed to feel no pain.
Down, down, down. This was all so awful that her mind wandered. She thought of the disrobed people in that room, their feet wet with Russell’s blood. She thought of all the plans and jokes and routines. The sides of the bed they slept on, the way she liked to doze while he drove. She thought of all the ways that life gets complicated when lives are intertwined, in ways that are impossible to explain except for the people living inside the tangle.
They got to the bottom—the reactor.
The machine was composed of networks of giant metal barrels connected by more metal tubing. These groaned and ticked in a way that seemed wrong and that she had not witnessed on the last visit. Heat came off the center of the thing in blurry waves.
Keith threw his machete to the landing, then jumped the last set of stairs. She was out of breath and in too much shock to come up with a better plan. She grabbed the knife by the dull end, threw it aside. In her peripheral vision, Hip and Josie hustled for it.
Keith’s costume was torn, revealing the pink-skinned man beneath. There was something tender in that pink—a human trapped under monster skin. Panting, wheezing, he stayed squatting, even as he struggled to stand. Closer now, she saw that his head was hemorrhaging blood in pulsing, heartbeat waves. He wobbled, landing on his bottom.
Linda came forward. How much he saw, she couldn’t guess. “Please,” he whispered. “Help.” Then, slowly, like something unwinding, he lay down on his back.
Linda felt his carotid artery. No flow. His blue fingers curled again and finally into stiff claws. His mouth opened and locked.
She pulled away his hood, a sleek Omnium material. She could see his sickly, once pleasant face. Full lips and small eyes. The end of the Parson line.
There were hands by her side. The kids. No one was ready yet to hug. You can’t hug when you’re that full of adrenaline. They stood over the body, not seeing that body, but thinking of Russell’s body.
How much time passed? Seconds? Minutes?
“Hello?” a voice asked.
They all three jumped. Between a coil composed of hundreds of rods and its attached metal barrels came Percy Khoury.
“This is the Beltane King?” he asked. His expression bore that same stunted fury as the first time she’d met him, way back on the soccer field in early September. Careless of the blood, he twisted the neck of Keith’s limp body to see his face. “You got him?”
Had they gotten him? It was hard to remember that far. Hard to think about anything except Russell on the floor.
Percy didn’t wipe his hands clean after touching the body, but stuck three fingers into his mouth and blew, loud and whistling. The sound was primal. It resonated, its meaning clear: Come here, pet. I have something for you. Linda and the kids backed away. She knew, even though, if asked, she wouldn’t have had the words to explain. You know some things on a deeper, wilder level, in a place without logic.
They heard rumbling. She remembered the thing in the dark with its knowing eyes. The sound was a kind of scuffling, feathery lumber, and she knew: it was coming.
Muscles shaking, bodies heaving, the family formerly known as the Farmer-Bowens did not have it in them to run.
Out from a crevice of the reactor lumbered the thing she’d imagined, and dreamed about, and feared: the great white caladrius. It was real, after all.
The size of a large and awkward man, it picked its way toward the stairs and crouched over Keith’s body. It nosed against his belly, the gesture almost loving, nudging him to wake up. Then, with sharp teeth, it tore open his trunk from groin to chest and began to eat.
The twins turned away. She watched. She needed to see. It left the skin and ate only from the insides. This included the bones. Then came two more giant caladrius and they, too, began to eat. She saw now that whatever personality she’d imagined for this species from tending Sunny was a projection. They were a mindless tide of dirty white predators drawn to the fresh smell of blood.
They hunkered, obscuring Keith’s carcass. She saw only cellar-filthy feathers that would never fly.
“He had that coming,” said Percy Khoury, the mad soccer dad without a child. “But don’t worry. They’re sneaky poopers. They won’t go after big game like humans. Just carrion.”
“What are you doing down here?” Linda asked, soft to avoid the attention of the creatures.
He wore that same outfit he’d been wearing when she’d first met him, his belly revealed under a loose, unbuttoned trench coat. She noticed, too, that his tool belt was now open and spread across the floor: big, specialized drills and coils and saws.
Percy’s eyes lit up. “God came to me. He told me to rain down the fire. I’m vengeance.” Then he put his finger vertical to his lips: “Shhh.”
* * *
Too numb to properly fear or understand what was happening, they took care, stepping softly as they passed the feeding scourge of caladrius. Then they climbed up, up, up. They found the kitchen. Things got familiar. They went into the Labyrinth, straight past the crossroads and then left to the stairs, just like Zach had taught them on their tour.
Blood covered, they summited at Caladrius Park.
In the bright midday sun that Monday following the great and final Plymouth Valley Winter Festival, the family once known as the Farmer-Bowens could be seen trudging through snowbanks, underdressed in slippers and bloody white robes. The few cars on the road slowed as they passed. Faces looked out. No one rolled down their windows or stopped, though a few pointed their devices.
Linda, Hip, and Josie climbed into their B-class sedan stationed just a few blocks from the park. Shivering though they didn’t know it, they drenched the car leather with melted snow and blood.
They didn’t stop at their house or bother to wash the gore from their hands. The suitcases were already packed and in the car. On the ride, no one said his name. They couldn’t bear to say his name.
They arrived at the wall.
Sally was there, along with her dad, Heinrich. Both were still high, their pupils narrow as hay needles. “Congratulations! You got out!” she said. Josie and Hip had gone still. Linda thought it was probably shock. They didn’t own the car, so they emptied it—one rolling suitcase for each of them, two for herself. They started walking.
“You don’t have to leave!” Heinrich said. “People get golden tickets for less. You won fair and square!”
The cold biting their skin, they kept going. The halfway house was only three kilometers away and though the day was cold, the sun was bright. Hip looped back to Linda, took the extra suitcase—Russell’s suitcase—from her. Then he forged ahead, and walked beside Josie.
Linda stayed a little behind. Never the sentimental type, she told herself not to look back. But this was impossible. She took one last glimpse of the place as its walls closed. The slanted winter sun washed everything behind them in red.
She could see, most likely, their future.
The three of them would consider the Great Lakes. They would plan and talk and behave as if this were their destination. The start of a new life. But in the end, they would return home to New York. She would take over Fielding’s position, and at first they would live in the storage basement at the Kings’ Pediatric Clinic, where she worked. The children would go back to their school, though they would be so changed that nothing would quite fit as it had.
They would talk of Russell and remember him. They would at first venerate him, as if he’d been a saint. Eventually, his feet would become clay. They’d talk about the flaws in him, and the way he’d never answered direct questions, the way he’d tucked secrets closer to him than his family. She had never been a romantic person. No ounce of sentiment. This would not inoculate her against the loss of Russell. She would never get over him.
BetterWorld would probably come after them. But she’d smuggled no damning evidence to take the company down. They’d likely leave her alone so long as she stayed quiet. Maybe this Caladrius spin-off corporation would work out. Maybe it would crash and burn under the corrupt agenda of a demagogue. The world would keep unwinding. But then again, maybe this low point was the bedrock from which people would rebuild. You can’t ever know such things when you’re living inside them. You can only hope and do your part.
They say you never get over the loss of a loved one and that’s true, but the human condition is resilient. There would be nightmares and skittishness. There would be unhealed wounds and distrust of new people. But because they had one another, this would mostly pass. They would move on, and learn new things and forge new attachments. There would be sickness. Unless by some miracle the air in New York got clean again, her health would probably not survive outside. If her sickness returned, she knew already that she would keep it a secret from her children, a burden she didn’t want them to carry. There would be struggle. There would be joy. There would be life.
“Bye,” she said.
Then they headed back into the world, the fucked-up, falling-apart, beautiful world.
CHAPTER 5 SUMMARY: Plymouth Valley Case Study: The Fall of the Anthropocene, the Rise of the Modern Global Ecosystem
But as we now know, the Maginot Lines that these corporate cities erected protected against the wrong things. For instance, on the last day of their annual Winter Festival in Plymouth Valley, a disgruntled employee initiated a nuclear meltdown in the very survivor tunnels built to protect against radiation.
It’s an Oedipal tragedy (metaphorically, but also literally, if accounts of John Parson Junior are to be believed). The Great Lakes Disaster Relief Consortium evacuated Plymouth Valley Extension’s residents. But the people of Plymouth Valley proper refused to believe their own Geiger counters. Like passengers on the Titanic, they could not conceive of what was happening. Rather than leaving the valley, or even seeking higher ground, they gathered in the very survivor tunnels that were poisoning them, dying within hours. The caladrius (a now common North American pest) were less sensitive to ionizing radiation. They shifted their diet from insects to meat, gorging themselves on thousands of human remains.
The Chinese-American Scientific Consortium rushed their nuclear-absorption device to the disaster site, testing it live for the first time while the world watched: Could the genie be forced back into its bottle? The successful remediation of Plymouth Valley became a watershed of human wonder as momentous as Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moon landing. Despite the executions of the scientists who’d invented the device, the technological feat ushered a wave of optimism and faith in science. Plymouth Valley was habitable within the year, its vegetation edible within the decade.
Crises precipitated change. The Great Unwinding halted. The age of the Anthropocene ended and the era of the Global Ecosystem began. Solar energy and soil advancements delivered exponential agricultural yields. Air pollution and algae blooms brought a respiratory crisis, and global leadership responded, copying BetterWorld’s dome policy for the majority of its cities. The pilot program for the first public Bell Jar was started in New York.
Unable to expunge corporate and political corruption from within, popular uprisings forced change from without. In London, São Paulo, Mexico City, Seattle, Omaha, Beijing, and St. Petersburg, the dayworkers joined together, and tore the walls down.
It’s rumored that some Plymouth Valley residents still live in the tunnels. Fearing the outside world, and unable to care for themselves without dayworkers, they remain there, like Morlocks. For those trivia buffs out there, Plymouth Valley’s disaster is the reason Halloween is now celebrated on Day of the Dead—Samhain. Revelers dress like PV Morlocks rising up from underground to steal children for meals down below. But of course, this is a myth.
—From THE FALL OF THE ANTHROPOCENE, by Jin Hyun, Seoul National University Press, 2093.
Acknowledgments
This book took too long to write! Hopefully it’s the better for it. It evolved in my imagination from a simple story about the breakdown of an American marriage to something bigger and, to me, more interesting, about the convenient stories we tell ourselves to get through our days and the goblins those stories tend to hide.
Since my last novel, I lost my mother, Carole Joan Langan (1942–2020), and my father, Peter Robert Langan (1944–2023). This was bad and sad, relieved only by the time I spent with my brother, Christopher (and Kara!); my uncles John, Michael, and Rick; and family friends Marilou Astudillo and Connie Vecchio during the week of June 19, 2023.
Lots of people helped with this novel. To start, my stalwart agent (I know I’ve described you this way before, Stacia, but I can think of no better word), Stacia Decker; my brainy and brilliant editor, Loan Le, who seems to have faith in me when I don’t (thank you!); Jimmy Iacobelli (How did you do it? This cover is spectacular!); David Brown (I want to win the Roomba Thunderdome so much!); Maudee Genao (thank you!); and the whole excellent Atria team (Libby McGuire, Lindsay Sagnette, Dana Trocker, Dana Sloan, Elizabeth Hitti, Paige Lytle, Liz Byer, and Nicole Bond)—I love working with you. Thank you.
Early readers Meg Howrey, Sarah Tomlinson, Chris Terry, and J. Ryan Stradal proved invaluable. I’ve appreciated the general support of Erin Jontow; Alison Benson; close friends Kirsten Roeters and Dave Eilenberg, who have us over for holidays and let us pretend we’re family; and Maura Maloney, who noticed how badly I was flailing some years ago, and with great tact made an appointment for me with an entertainment lawyer. Thanks to Dr. Adella Johnson, who talked to me about clinical pediatrics in Nassau County. Your help was much appreciated, and everything I got wrong is entirely my fault.
