Chương 82: Chapter 79: George’s Run (XIV)

The memory faded and George took a deep breath. The fire crackled. He leaned back into the chair and said, "That was Jane." He opened his mouth inside the helmet to say something else, but his mind seemed out of words. That was his memory, but he couldn't imagine being a version of himself that could do that. He felt simultaneously ashamed and separate from the George in that memory, as if it had happened to a different person. Begin the third memory?

The notification hung in his vision, but he did not accept it yet.

"These memories seem connected to questions in the trivia room," George said. >>I noticed. If that is the ride we are on, we should expect a memory about how your kids entered the game, how Max made a devil's bargain to save Kat, and probably how Jane died. With that, the next memory began. Memory Three: The Dim Lit Days The memory began and George found himself lying on his couch in the familiar apartment in Chicago. This was after the divorce but must have been before the world started falling apart.

The only light in the apartment was a shaft of sun coming in through the window above the low bookcase. The small coffee table in front of the couch was strewn with food containers, wadded-up paper towels, a remote control, and a coffee mug on its side. Near the couch, a stack of books had tipped over, just out of arm's reach. It had been two weeks since he'd received the news that Jane had been killed in a head-on collision with a drunk driver.

She'd been driving to see Max and he'd been the one who called George to give him the news. It was a short conversation, just details. And then Max hung up. Max had been crying and his voice was raw. There was also a note of anger under his words—anger at George. Or maybe George was just imagining that. It was certainly what he felt. If their lives had gone another direction, Jane would be alive. If they had stayed together, Jane would be alive. If George had only changed sooner, Jane would be alive.

And his children would still speak to him. And his whole family would be together. He had not left the small triangle between the couch, the bathroom, and the kitchen since Max called. He'd ordered groceries to be delivered a few times, but last week he had forgotten they were there and left them out in the hallway for days. He had not remembered, until one of his neighbors had banged on his door. They were starting to smell. He tried to call Kat and Kit, but they wouldn't answer.

He called Max to ask where the funeral was, but Max wouldn't say. So George had stayed on the couch. Every time he tried to think of Jane, a black gloom rushed into his mind, a non-thought, a non-existence. A Nothing. The Nothing was a blank darkness that had settled into his whole frame—filling his chest, his arms, his mind. That is how those first days went.

There would be a flash, an image, a memory—the way Jane made the bed every morning with the sheets tucked so tight that he had to rip his side of the blanket free of the edge of the mattress every night—and then it was gone. The Nothing rose up and ate the memory and his mind went blank again. The Nothing let him shuffle off to the bathroom to pee. It let him eat, but making the trip to the bed seemed impossible. So he kept to the couch. He knew Max would take care of the arrangements.

Max would take care of the others. Max knew how to take care of things. Kat didn't want to talk to him. Kit didn't need him any more, but they had Max. Max would—but then the Nothing swallowed those thoughts, too, and his mind shied back into the lightless corners of his consciousness. It hadn't been like this after the divorce. There had been too much to do, more than he'd imagined when they signed the papers. He found an apartment alone. He put all his things in boxes alone.

He drove the truck alone, and he unpacked them alone. But what he remembered wasn't loneliness, it wasn't even regret or sadness—it was busyness. There was always some crisis at work. And there was a new life to build, a new start. And he still had Sonya. She said the right things about the divorce, but there was an undercurrent of relief in her. He was free now, after all. She kept him busy in a hundred ways. He was surprised at how quickly the new spaces in his life filled up in Jane's absence.

But now she was truly gone. She entered a car alive. She was going to see Max. He'd just been engaged. Then the accident ended her. Max didn't tell him much. There was an accident. A drunk driver. Maybe it happened like this: she looked down for a moment—at the directions, at a text. She had not seen the oncoming car wobble, then lazily veer into her lane. When she looked up, there wasn't time to swerve, only panic. Only mechanics. Now she was gone. There was only an absence where she used to be. A nothing.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Then a thought rang like a bell in his mind so loud it rattled his whole self: a Magic Eraser. Yes. He would get a Magic Eraser. He'd clean up, start with a blank slate. The idea filled him with energy and he sat up. It broke something loose in him. He would start with the bathtub. How long had it been since he cleaned it? He would scour every inch and then he'd do the tile. Hell, he might even tear up the tile.

He had always disliked green. He'd take it down the subfloor and then lay down something simple, something classic. He'd always wanted black and white tile in the bathroom. The thoughts poured into his head in a rush, as if weeks of silence had built up a surplus that now came flooding in. He'd stop at the hardware store, and maybe Walmart, just to see what was there. He threw on his coat and put his wallet in his pockets. He put on his snow boots and wrapped a scarf around his neck.

He'd start with Magic Erasers, lots of them. Then he'd get some amenities. Maybe some of those nice, big headphones so he could turn the music up without bothering the neighbors. Some new tools, definitely. A TV, one of the big ones. A new phone. He would have to set it up but he'd always liked that part. Maybe he would buy a pipe. He left the apartment and started the car. He turned the defrost on and waited. He blew on his hands. Then the memory ended.

When George opened his eyes in the recreation of the pub, he felt tears on his cheeks. His throat felt pinched shut. He tried to blink his tears away because he could not touch his face through the helmet. Begin the fourth memory? >>Just get it over with, George. >>You got this. Almost there. George mentally assented to the prompt and the fourth memory began. Memory Four: The Mechanical Hounds George suddenly found himself sitting around a fire in the woods with a handful of other people.

It was night and George could see seven or eight other campfires flickering in the distance. This was some kind of campsite. People were running out of the city on foot and some of them had gathered here. Someone was barbecuing meat and it filled the air with a smell that made George's stomach rumble. He had only lived on packaged food for days. This was after the flu had swept through the city, and after the night the glowing mold had grown on everything and then disappeared.

That was the last remotely normal night. After that, the news had gone strange. There were reports of even weirder things happening. The self-driving cars had all gone rogue at once. Some had driven at high speeds straight into walls, killing their passengers. Some of them had even started hunting pedestrians. George had seen one running down people in the park across from the apartment. A woman was inside the car banging on the window and screaming to be let out.

The car had ramped the embankment and plunged straight into the river. One night early on, he'd heard screaming coming from another apartment. It was the old lady in the unit above him. He'd been up late on his computer. He stuck his head out of his door and listened. Then he heard more screams coming from one of the units down the hall. He heard a mechanical skittering sound coming from inside his own apartment. It sounded like it was coming from the kitchen. Or the bathroom.

He rounded the corner and flicked on the light and then jumped backward as he saw a pile of little metal bugs climbing up out of the sink drain. They were pouring up through the drain in the bathtub and crawling up the flimsy white shower curtain. He ran back to the door of his apartment. He could see a few of the bugs on the kitchen floor. He grabbed his boots and ran out into the hall. He could hear sounds of chaos coming from the other units in the hallway. He ran outside.

He waited on the street as more people came outside from buildings all around. Some were crying. Some looked confused. Everyone was afraid. The red light of a fire flickered in one of the windows in George's building. That had all been days ago. Since that night, the refugees—for that is how George had started to think of them—moved further out of the city. It wasn't safe. There were too many machines. Some were familiar. Others were things George had never even imagined. And there were the hounds.

George heard them before he saw them. Their howl was a combination of a siren and a canine growl. They had started picking people off. Someone would walk across an alley and one of them would spring out and drag their unlucky victim back between the houses, or between two cars, or, in one horrifying moment, down into the storm drain. There was nothing anyone could do about them. Some of the refugees had guns, but the hounds moved too fast. If a bullet struck them, it only seemed to anger them.

Once he was clear of the suburbs, George had fallen in with a group of people and they'd been running from one threat to another ever since—until they'd found this campsite. The people seemed a little calmer here. The tall trees and the firelight gave a sense of shelter.

"What are we supposed to do now?" A woman said. Her name was Celia. She had appeared in the group last night but no one had been able to get her story out of her. She was wearing a sweater and stained sweatpants. She hadn't let go of her phone all day even though it was dead. No one answered her. The man sitting next to her was wearing a business suit that looked like it had once cost a lot of money. Now it bore the marks of consecutive nights of sleeping on the ground. He didn't respond to Celia's question.

He only stared at the fire with a blank look on his face. He had walked out of the woods an hour ago wearing that same look and hadn't said a word since he sat down. He only watched the fire.

"Do you have service?" Celia said. Her question was directed at a Hispanic man across the fire who was poking at his smartphone with his bifocals perched on the end of his nose. He shook his head and said, "Nada. Nothing. No service." Then George heard the sound in the distance that some part of him had been waiting for, bracing for. The howls rose in the dark from the trees off to the west. Screams immediately followed from the direction of the campfires over there.

George stood up and could see dark silhouettes running through the trees. They were running this direction. Celia screamed. The hispanic man was shielding his face from the firelight and peering into the darkness. His glasses had fallen onto the ground. One of the hounds sprang from the dark and bowled into his chest. George didn't wait to see what happened. He sprinted away. Celia was next to him. Then she wasn't. He kept running. Trees whipped by his head in the dark.

The sound of the hounds and the screams receded behind him, but he still ran. He ran until he was alone and collapsed on the ground. He tried to stay quiet but he couldn't stop gasping loudly. The gasps turned into sobs. He told himself to be quiet, that the hounds seemed to hunt by sound as well as scent, but he couldn't stop. He was alone in the dark and the world was coming apart around him. So he curled up on the ground and cried. When the wave of emotion passed, he stood up. The woods were quiet again.

They still smelled like woodsmoke and cooking meat. He picked a direction and started walking. The memory ended.