“Where?”
“Here.”
Malorie reaches out, feels the doorjamb of an open classroom. It smells of people in here.
“Tom?” she says.
“Mom,” Tom says. She hears the smile in his voice. She can tell he’s proud.
She goes to him, crouches, and feels for his eyes. They are covered with what feels like cardboard, and Malorie thinks of Tom the man wearing a helmet of couch cushions and tape.
The relief she feels is not tempered by the chaos in the halls. Her children are with her again.
“Get up,” she says, her voice still trembling. “We’re leaving.”
She steps farther into the room, finds the beds, removes three blankets.
“Are we taking the river again?” Tom asks.
Beyond them, the madness does not quell. Boots clamor up and down the halls. Glass breaks. Children scream.
“No,” Malorie says. Then, frantic, “I don’t know. I have no plan. Take these.”
She hands them each a blanket.
“Cover yourselves from head to toe.”
She thinks of blind Annette, blue robe, red hair, the knife.
“They can touch us now,” she says.
“Mom,” Tom says, but Malorie reaches out and takes his hand. The violence swells, swallowing the questions he was close to asking.
Olympia takes Malorie’s other hand.
Malorie breathes in, she holds it, she breathes out.
“Now,” she says. “Now…we go.”
They step, together, out of the classroom and into the hall.
“The front door,” she says.
The same door they entered two years ago, Malorie’s body and mind then ravaged by rowing and the constant bowstring terror of navigating the water blind.
And the fear then, too, of a man named Gary.
“Malorie?”
Malorie, under the blanket, grips the hands of her children. It’s a man named Jesse who speaks to her. Malorie knows Jesse, when sane, had a crush on her. He does not sound sane now.
“Malorie? Where are you taking the kids?”
“Go,” Malorie says. She does not turn around. She does not answer Jesse, who now follows close behind.
“Malorie,” he says. “You can’t go.”
Malorie makes a fist, turns, and swings.
Her fist connects with what she believes is Jesse’s jaw.
He cries out.
She grips the hands of her children.
Tom and Olympia move in concert with her, the trio making for the open front door.
“My blindfold worked,” Tom says. Still, despite the horror, there is pride in his voice.
“It’s here,” Olympia says, indicating the door.
Malorie places a palm against the doorjamb. She listens for Jesse. For anyone.
She breathes in. She holds it. She breathes out.
“How many are out there?” she asks. “How many do you hear?”
The kids are quiet. The frenzy continues deeper into the school. But it feels far now. Farther. Malorie knows Tom wants to answer her questions exactly. But he can’t.
“Too many to count,” he says.
“Olympia?”
A pause. A crash from far behind. A scream.
“A lot,” Olympia says.
“Okay. Okay. Don’t take the blankets off. Wear them until I tell you otherwise. They touch us now. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Tom says.
“Yes,” Olympia says.
Malorie tries to close her eyes a third time. Tries to shutter her imagination to what lurks outside.
A lot.
She tries to close her eyes a fourth time, a fifth, a sixth. She wants to say something about how unfair this is. She wants to tell someone her age. Someone raised before the creatures came. How it shouldn’t be that a mother and her children have to flee the place they call home, so suddenly, to enter a world where the threats are worse than those they leave behind.
She grips the hands of her children and takes the first step away from the Jane Tucker School for the Blind.
This is the new world. This is how things are and how they have been for many years.
From hysteria to the complete unknown.
The three of them, blind, draped in cloth, setting out.
Alone.
Again.
ONE
Tom is getting water from the well. It’s something he’s done every other day for the better part of a decade, the three of them having called Camp Yadin home for that long. Olympia believes the camp was once an outpost in the American frontier days. She’s read almost every book in the camp library (more than a thousand), including books on the history of Michigan. She says the camp lodge was most likely once a saloon. Cabin One was the jail. Tom doesn’t know if she’s right, though he has no reason not to believe her. It was a Jewish summer camp when the creatures came, that much is for sure. And now, it’s home.
“Hand over hand,” he says, taking the rope that connects Cabin Three to the stone lip of the well. He says it because, despite the ropes that tie every building to one another (and even link Cabin Ten to the H dock on the lake), he’s trying to come up with a better way to move about.
Tom loathes the blindfolds. Sometimes, when he’s feeling particularly lazy, he doesn’t use one at all. He keeps his eyes closed. But his mother’s never-ending rules remain firm in his mind.
Closing your eyes isn’t enough. You could be startled into opening them. Or something could open them for you.
Sure. Yes. In theory Malorie is right. In theory she usually is. But who wants to live in theory? Tom is sixteen years old now. He was born into this world. And nothing’s tried to open his eyes yet.
“Hand over hand.”
He’s almost there. Malorie insists that he check the water before bringing it up. She’s told him the story of two men named Felix and Jules many times. How his namesake, Tom the man, tested the water the two brought back, the water everybody was worried could be contaminated by a creature. Tom the teen likes that part of the story. He relates to the test. He even relates to the idea of new information about the creatures. Anything would be more to work with than what they have. But he’s not worried about something swimming in their drinking water. The filter he invented himself has taken care of that.