All Good Children Read online

  “It’s quick,” Omalis says slowly. “And quite painless.”

  She draws the uncapped syringe from her loose jacket pocket and stabs it into Jordan’s shoulder in one movement. She’s certain the girl doesn’t even see this motion, just feels the piercing needle and the rush of something hot through her, and sees the needle for the second before Omalis draws it back out and puts it back into her pocket, and tries to connect all of these things in her steadily heating mind. The question is on her lips but it doesn’t get to escape before the seizure starts. Omalis catches her before her convulsions throw her against the table, and lays her on the floor on her side. She goes to the intercom next to the door.

  “I need a medic in room three,” she says into it, calm, strange. Rehearsed.

  EIGHT

  JORDAN

  I WAKE UP TO THE distinct smell of Bactine. This triggers some sort of sensory memory because I see my mom even though my eyes aren’t open yet. She’s bent over me in my bed, rubbing a cotton swab covered in the stinging medicine along a jagged scrape on my elbow. I guess I expect to see her when I actually do open my eyes because my heartbeat grows rapid as my lids flutter open, and then all but dies when she is not truly there.

  It’s dark, wherever I am, and I can barely see two feet in front of my face. There’s a faint glow to my left, and when I turn my head I can see a console like the face of a complicated radio, all dials and knobs and blinking lights. It’s hard to tell, but I don’t think it is hooked up to anything; it’s sitting on a metal cart or table a few feet from my bed. Other than my own breathing, all I hear is its low hum, and the wind outside.

  I look around and think I am in a tent. The ceiling is low, kind of curved in and meeting in a V-shape at its top-most point maybe four feet above my face. It’s some dark color I can’t quite make out. When the wind picks up, the ceiling and walls bend in slightly. There’s a draft wafting up from below me. Yep, tent.

  The bed I’m in is little more than a cot with guardrails. Thin mattress, thinner pillow, not even a blanket. I’m wearing the same old sweats. There’s no scrape on my elbow, but there’s still that Bactine smell. I lift my hands and smell them, lift my arm and sniff. That’s when I realize it’s not coming from me, but from all around me, from the bed itself. It’s a shadow smell that’s soaked into the mattress and the pillow, and it’s obvious where I am: a medical tent.

  But how did I get here?

  I feel okay, except a light throbbing in my right shoulder, but when I put my hand there it feels smooth, no bumps or scratches. My head feels a little groggy and my stomach a little achy, but I think that is because I have not eaten in a while. Although, I’m not entirely sure what time it is. The color and thick nylon fabric of the tent are too dense to allow any light inside, even if the sun were shining. There’s only the pale blue light of the machine next to me. I look at it again. A heart monitor thingy, like from a hospital? But there’s no line spiking up and down, and no numerical display. Besides, it isn’t hooked up to anything, least of all me.

  I think I want to get out of here. No, I definitely know I want to get out of here, especially because I don’t know why I’m here. Maybe it was the food, like food poisoning or something. I remember the last meal I ate was breakfast this morning—if it was this morning—and the eggs were really runny and the gravy tasted kind of sour and old. But I didn’t eat a lot of it; in fact, Taylor ate most of it for me. If I’m ill, Taylor should be too, but she must be in another tent as this one is definitely single-occupancy.

  Of course, I don’t think it was food poisoning. I don’t think Taylor is here. I wish she were. The drafty air is getting colder, and trying to think over the meaning of this new situation isn’t making anything any warmer. It’d be nice to have her with me, holding my hand, making her own postulations about the predicament, laughing at some stupid joke I made in an effort to make us both feel better.

  The scariest thing about being here is that nothing is keeping me here. I’m not strapped down or plugged into anything. My eyes have adjusted to the dark just enough to see that across the “room” is the front of the tent, complete with zippered flap. It zips up from the outside but that shouldn’t be difficult to manage. Yet, I can’t move. I may be allowed to go, but should I go? If this is some sort of test, some sort of measurement of something of mine that might determine whether or not I have a future, what the hell am I supposed to do to pass it?

  I sit up, starting to shake, trying to stop. I look to the corners of the tent, near the top, checking for cameras. There are none. My eyes find the machine again. Maybe it is some sort of monitoring device, after all.

  I hear a metallic vizzzzzz sound and whip my head toward the front of the tent. The zipper is down and flaps are cast aside and a shadow enters the tent. If I thought my heart was beating fast at the expectation of seeing my mother when I first opened my eyes, I was an idiot. I could power a small village with what’s happening inside my chest right now.

  The shadow is swallowed by the darkness in the tent, and I am frozen. I follow the faint outline of its form with my eyes as it circles around the left side of me. I feel a scream welling up, and visions of things hiding under my bed, creating worlds in my closet when I’m not there. But instead of going for me, the shadow goes for the machine. The blue light is smothered by its hand, and, after a series of clicks, the walls of the tent catch fire.

  As I blink the room comes into focus, and I see that the tent’s walls and roof are lined with strands of tiny, bright yellow bulbs, like Christmas lights. The machine is indeed connected to something, the plug for the lights, down near the wheel of the cart it sits on.

  The sudden light brings relief, but the air I might have let out in a nice deserved sigh is quickly sucked back in at the sight of the “shadow.”

  I’ve never seen her before, but then, this camp is probably a lot larger than I think. She wears the same gray sweatpants and shirt that all the other counselors wear, except something is off. It only takes me a second to find it: the right breast of her shirt where her numbers should be is blank, just cool slate-gray cotton. Her skin looks creamy in the yellow light, and it glistens at her neckline. She isn’t smiling at me, like most of the others would have, trying to keep me calm, placid. Instead, she’s almost frowning, her dark eyes narrowed severely, narrowed at me.

  “Hello, Jordan,” she says, taking a step toward my cot. Hearing my name on this stranger’s lips is like a balm; it loosens me, makes me feel I can do anything. But then I remember where I am, I remember myself, and all the things I’ve forgotten, or never knew.

  I sit up straighter. “What’s going on?”

  “You’ll be all right. My name is Marla Matheson.” Then she does something that almost has me rolling: she reaches out her hand to shake mine. Like we’re at a fancy dinner party, or a parent-teacher conference.

  But I can’t laugh, not in here. Not anymore. And I can’t take her hand, because I don’t know why she’s offered it, not really. I look at her hand as she realizes I won’t be roped into some meaningless pleasantry and draws it slowly back to her side. I get a flash of the inside of her wrist; something is written there in dark ink, a tattoo. Maybe a scar.

  “I came here to speak with you about something vitally important,” she says. She uses these fifty-cent words but her accent is painting pictures for me of a past spent trying to talk her way out of the back of a good ol’ boy’s pickup ’cause she still needs to get home in time to finish her chores around the farmhouse. The kind my mom sometimes lets slip out when she’s angry, kind of tough, kind of rocky. “I know you respond best when you’re not talked down to, Jordan, so I’ll try my hardest to be straight with you.”

  There’s a plunging feeling in my gut. “Oh god,” I hear myself say.

  She blinks. “What is it?” Eyes darting over me, leaning forward, looking concerned. She plays her part so well, this Marla.

  “This is it, right?” Saying this could make things worse, but…bu
t…could it, really? I’m not so sure anymore. “You’re here to take me, right? To…to…prepare me? The program … it’s over for me…isn’t it?”

  She leans back and breathes a sigh, as if relieved. Presses a hand to her heart, the one with the faded black ink. “Oh, Jordan, no.” She shakes her head and almost laughs. I almost drop a load.

  “I’m here on an entirely different agenda.” Serious again. “I want you to know—no, I need you to know—how serious this is. How real. How much I am trusting you by coming here, hoping that you might trust me in return.”

  She pauses here, for effect or for a reaction. My insides plummet again. Outside, the crickets start up, crying out their midnight song for mates.

  “I’m a member of the Resistance, Jordan. I’m here on a mission for them. I’m here to fight back. And I need your help.”

  It takes me a minute to take in all the sounds she’s just made and turn them into words, then to sentences, then to anything that makes any kind of sense. I go cold all over, start to shiver. There’s no blanket, no goddamn blanket. What kind of medical tent doesn’t stock any blankets?

  “Are you all right?”

  It could be a test, is my first thought. It could be for real, is my second. A or B, gotta pick one. Which one is your money on, Jordan? The biggest risk has the biggest pay out.

  “What do you want from me?” I ask.

  “A lot,” she says. “Can I trust you?”

  “Can I trust you? What if I scream for someone? Will you run? Or stay and…shake hands?”

  “I’m afraid I’d have to kill them,” she says, no joke, just like that. “Then I’d run, yes.”

  “Jesus.”

  “We have to try to get along without him now, don’t you think?”

  I press my knuckles into my eyes, still see the brightness of the tent between my fingers. A headache’s coming on, pushing its way from the back of my skull to the front.

  “What have you got to lose?” she asks me.

  Huh.

  I tell her, “You can trust me.”

  “I can’t make you do anything, you understand that, Jordan?” Those severe eyes softening a little, or maybe it’s just the light. “All I can do is lay out what I need from you, show you all my cards, and you decide what you are able to do with them, for us. Understand?”

  “So, lay ’em down then.”

  “I know you’ve heard of other resistance movements; I know you think fighting back only gets you killed quicker. You’re right to think that. Our faction is no different… Well, it’s marginally different. Do you know what genetics are?”

  I shake my head. “Like biology?”

  “Yes, like biology. Specifically, the science of heredity, of the make-up of an organism. The study of genetics was outlawed immediately following the war, that’s why you’ll only hear your grandparents talking about it, if they dare to. Well, and people like me.”

  She smiles, waits for me to return it. I’m still trying to deal with this whole being-vitally-important issue that we seem to be taking a lifetime to get to. She clears her throat and goes on.

  “You see, for as long as we as a species have been oppressed, we’ve fought back. We’ve turned to technology, to science, to help us. We think that because our enemy is bigger and stronger, that we must make ourselves bigger and stronger to defeat them. This means weapons, this means war. Even when this method fails, we remind ourselves it was because our weapons were not big enough, and we embark on making them more powerful. Our enemy meets us every time. They aren’t winning because they’re bigger and stronger, Jordan. They’re winning because they are smarter, and they are smarter because we’ve let them dumb us down.”

  “I thought they were winning because they’re immortal,” I say, trying not to sound too blasé, but, I mean, come on. I think I make a pretty good point.

  Her dark eyes seem to shimmer with new life. If I were close enough to touch the skin on her arm, it would quiver with excitement. “They only want us to believe they are. That’s where genetics comes in.”

  She paws at the front of her sweatshirt and lifts it up, revealing a slim fanny pack strapped around her stomach. She pulls it free, still talking. “My father was a genetics professor at Yale. Even before the order to burn all texts dealing in any way with genetics came down, he started hiding his collection. Over the years, parts of it were discovered and destroyed, but a few volumes survived.”

  From the fanny pack she produces what looks like a small video-game player, flips it open, and sets it on the rail of the bed.

  “Of course, to learn anything worthwhile about an organism, to discover what makes it tick, what gives it life and makes it able to pass that life onto others, it isn’t enough to read a few books. Especially when the species you really want to learn about has not been captured in any text.”

  She presses a button and the screen blinks on.

  “That’s why we have a live specimen.”

  The screen is about five inches in diameter, the resolution dim and shaky, but there is no mistaking what I am seeing. It’s one of them, bound to a bed or table by a cage of wires that seem to encase its entire body. The camera moves over this image, gliding along above the coarse dark hair, which is all I can see of it until the camera reaches its face. “Face” is not the right word. It only has eyes, eyes in the middle of its pimpled head, yellow filmy eyes that have no pupil. These rest an inch or two above its beak—which is a funny word, too funny for the damage that sharp, serrated thing can really do. It’s a sword, it’s a spear. It’s nothing compared to the thing’s talons, which the video screen, mercifully, does not show.

  “Turn it off,” I say, barely audible.

  Marla presses the button again and the screen goes black.

  “You’re insane,” I tell her.

  “We’ve learned so much from only this one creature,” she says. “Don’t be afraid of it, Jordan. We’ve learned its strengths and its weaknesses. Believe me, it has many weaknesses.”

  “You think they don’t know you have one of them?” I want to scream it but my words are still coming out like swallowed whispers. “They’ll hunt you down. They’ll rip you apart. They’ll—”

  “I promise you they do not know.” She reaches her hand out to me but I pull back.

  “I don’t want to,” I say. “No, no. I don’t want to do this.”

  “Okay,” she says. “I can’t make you. Will you listen to what I have to say, though? Only that, only listen.”

  I point at the video device. “Put that away.”

  She obliges.

  “We know the Over have no idea that we have captured one of their own because their primary form of communication is telepathy. Those wires you saw in the video? They are connected to machines keeping the thing alive in body only, not in mind. Think of it as the creature is in a coma, brain dead. It can’t talk to anyone.”

  This isn’t soothing but I nod my understanding so she’ll finish her speech. Before she can say another word, there’s movement outside the tent, close by. Voices. I stiffen, but Marla doesn’t even seem to notice.

  “I’m not going to ask you to decide anything tonight,” she goes on, “but I do want to make you perfectly aware of two things. First, there is absolutely no guilt or blame if you decide against joining us. What I’m asking of you is huge, it’s beyond huge. It’s a burden I wish I didn’t have to ask you to carry, and it’s okay to hand it right back over to me. Do you understand?”

  I nod frantically, eyeing the flap of the tent as the voices draw nearer.

  “Good. Secondly, deciding to help us will not save your life. What we need you to do requires you to be selected for a certain program. We will not rescue you once your task is carried out. You will not come back. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes, I get it,” I say in a rush. “Suicide mission, check. Someone’s coming, don’t you hear them?”

  But the voices begin to fade almost immediately after I say this. Marla is smi
ling again.

  “Thanks for keeping an ear out,” she says. “But you’re right, I shouldn’t overstay my welcome here.”

  She stands up, refastening the fanny pack around her stomach. As she works the strap around the pack, her wrist twists so I can see the underside where the flesh is lighter and the ink of her tattoo darker. I make out the word SHALL.

  “What does it say?” I ask, pointing.

  She pauses in her work and turns her wrist over, pushing the sleeve of her shirt back for a better look. “This too shall pass,” she says.

  “What does that mean?”

  “A few things.” She finishes adjusting the pack and tucks her shirt in over it. “I’ll tell you later, if we meet again.”

  She goes to the light machine and makes to turn it off, then stops and turns back to me. “I almost forgot.” She lifts her shirt back up, unzips a pocket of the pack, and produces a small green plastic bottle.

  “For your ODD,” she says, “if you feel you need them.”

  I take the bottle and stuff it in the waistband of my sweats. “Thanks.” I want to say more, but I don’t. I want to ask more questions, but I just sit there and watch her turn off the lights. I follow her shadow to the front of the tent, listen as she unzips the flap.

  “Jordan,” comes Marla’s voice in the dark. It is at once soothing and terrifying. “Do think over what I’ve told you tonight. I’ll make contact with you again next week.”

  She goes, leaving me with the soft hum of the light machine, the delicate pounding of my heart, and a bottle full of pills that could easily make my decision for me.

  NINE

  OMALIS

  THE ONLY TIME HEAVEN OMALIS allows herself to feel guilty is when she is in bed with Marla Matheson. When she is curled behind her, one hand cupped around Marla’s soft breast, the other rubbing fast-slow-fast against her, sliding her own wetness against the back of Marla’s thigh, Omalis will close her eyes and whisper in her mind, Murderer. Marla likes to look into Omalis’s eyes when her fingers are inside Omalis, so when this happens Omalis will bite the sides of her own tongue and try to come as quickly as possible. Once, she bit her tongue so hard that she cried out and blood splattered her chin. Marla tried to pull out of her, but Omalis held her hand in place until she climaxed. After, Omalis’s sleep was deep and dreamless.