We caught up with her as she got in the car. “Sorry,” she mumbled, wiping her eyes again.
“Don’t be sorry,” I said quietly as I buckled myself into the front passenger seat.
In the back seat, Rex said, “Look at that.”
“What?” Claudia asked. “What is it?”
I pointed out the window at a pale blue van driving slowly past. “Wells Life Sciences again,” I said. “Same as the vans from the chicken plant. And the one at the reservoir.”
She glanced at me, her face suddenly hard and determined. “What’s it doing here?” Before either of us could answer, she put the car in forward and let it roll toward the corner, lightly pressing the brakes to come to a stop.
The van had stopped in front of the double gate, which Chris was now opening.
“What the hell?” Claudia said under her breath as the van drove through the gate and onto the factory grounds. Chris looked around as he closed the gates and locked them. He didn’t seem to have noticed us watching.
“What do you think that’s about?” Rex said from the back seat.
I looked back at him, pretty certain he was wondering the same thing I was: Does this have anything to do with Wells’s super-flu?
I turned to Claudia. “Should we ask your dad?”
She thought about it for a second, then shook her head and hit the accelerator hard. “I don’t think I’d believe whatever he told us.”
FORTY-FOUR
Driving through the city, we had to take several detours around areas that were closed off due to quarantines or smoke from brush fires. The traffic was dense, and even though Smartdrive kept the cars moving in an orderly manner, it was slow going. When we finally reached the bridge into New Jersey, we could see a pall of bluish smoke hanging in the air over both sides of the river, with darker smudges here and there where fresh smoke was rising into the air. On the ground, both Philapelphia and Camden sparkled with flashing lights. It looked surreal, beautiful in a way, but also like a world on the brink of collapse. Suddenly, the threat of Wells’s insanity seemed very, very present.
“Shit’s for real,” Rex said, his forehead pressed up against the window.
“I know,” Claudia said. “Even just the brush fires, apart from anything else. Worse and worse each year.” Then quietly, like she was talking to herself, she said, “Makes you wonder how long it will be before the whole world catches fire.”
Once we got off the bridge and the highway, Rex and I directed Claudia through the maze of smaller streets.
When we pulled up in front of Ogden’s house and got out of the car, he came out onto the porch, hands in his pockets. “Hey,” he said, but his head was shaking slightly from side to side, so subtle I couldn’t be sure I saw it.
“Hey,” I said. He seemed to be still shaking his head as I said, “We need to talk.”
He sighed and his shoulders slumped. “Okay,” he said, “come on.”
Rex stepped closer and said, “Is something wrong?”
Then the door behind Ogden opened wider and Roberta stepped out, carrying a shotgun. “Everything’s just fine,” she said. “Come on in.”
“Yay!” Claudia said. “Roberta’s here.”
I sensed movement behind me and turned to see Zak, Roberta’s zebra-spliced friend from the vertical farm, stepping out from behind the house, also holding a shotgun.
Rex growled in frustration, I think annoyed at himself for having let them get the jump on us like this. I was annoyed at myself, too, but I put my hand on his arm and said, “It’s okay. We came to talk to CLAD, we’ll talk to CLAD.”
Ogden stared at us as we walked up the steps, looking us each in the eye as if trying to convey some kind of meaning. Maybe if I’d known him better I would have understood, but all I could glean was that he had something to say. When we got up onto the porch, he turned and preceded us inside.
Roberta waited for us to go in first. Rex led the way. As I followed him, Roberta and I exchanged a cold stare. As Claudia moved past her behind me, she said, “Lovely to see you, too.”
The house was darker than before. The light was gray, and it was coming in at different angles. The place seemed smaller with the six of us in there.
Roberta pointed her shotgun at Rex and then at Claudia. “You two wait down here with Zak.” She nodded at Ogden, who went into the kitchen and brought back two chairs.
“Sit,” Roberta said, and Rex and Claudia both looked at me, waiting for my response, as if they were waiting to follow my lead.
I felt an intense love for them both right then. We’d been through a lot together, and were about to go through some more, and I realized at that inopportune moment how deeply grateful I was to have them both in my life.
Less than a year earlier, I had been essentially alone in the world, apart from Del. The pain of losing him had dulled into a constant ache that underlay everything else. But the loneliness that could have overwhelmed me was no match for the affection I felt from Rex and Claudia and my other new friends, Ruth and Pell and Sly. Even cranky Jerry. So much craziness had happened over the last few months, I didn’t often stop to appreciate how lucky I was. Of course, I also realized now probably wasn’t the best time to do it, either.
Maybe, in the back of my mind, I realized time could be running out to do so.
“It’s okay,” I told them, my voice betraying enough of the emotion roiling inside me that Roberta snorted and rolled her eyes.
I turned to her and shook my head. “Do you have to be such a jerk at all times?”
She curled her lip at me. “Maybe you bring it out in me.” She motioned with the rifle toward the steps. “Now come on upstairs.”
I gave Rex and Claudia a shrug, trying to convey a nonchalance I didn’t feel. As I headed up the stairs with Roberta behind me, Zak handed Ogden a sheaf of plastic zip ties and stepped back to cover Rex and Claudia with his shotgun while Ogden secured their wrists and ankles to the chairs.
“You know, we came here voluntarily,” Rex said. “This isn’t really necessary.”
Ogden ignored him as he tightened the zip ties.
The second floor consisted of a short hallway with five doors leading off of it, all of them closed except for the bathroom at one end and a bedroom at the other end, unfurnished except for another kitchen chair, identical to the ones Rex and Claudia were sitting in.
Roberta and her shotgun herded me into the bedroom.
I struggled not to show any fear, but there was plenty, and it was growing. I didn’t know what she had in store for me, but as she zip-tied me to the chair and stalked out of the room, I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be pleasant. As I faced up to my fears about my immediate fate, I had to acknowledge how scared I was about the fate of the world around me, as well.
It was a fear I’d known all my life, to some extent. Between the ever-worsening climate and the possibility of another flu pandemic like the one that had taken my father, ever since I was little, I’d been trying to keep those fears at bay, to live my life as if there wasn’t a chance the environment could completely collapse, or that at any moment some tiny, invisible microbe could take away everyone I loved, destroy the world as I knew it, and kill me, too.