“Jesus, Christ. I thought you were still down there, you know that? I half swam across the river and half climbed the damn bridges trying to get you.”
Something tight and curved stretched on his mouth, almost a grin. “Dumbass.”
“Tell me about it.”
“We’re all dead, now. Get off of me, lady,” he said to the EMT. “I’m fine. Get the fuck off of me.”
She backed away, but came back a second or two later with a towel and a bottle of water. “I don’t know if you’re fine or not, but here—take these.”
He took the towel and wrapped it around his shoulders, then opened the water and downed it in a few quick gulps while I watched. “Didn’t realize,” he gasped. “Didn’t realize how thirsty I was. Water, water everywhere—and all the boards did shrink,” he bubbled, killing off the last of the bottle and dropping it empty down at his side.
“You’re alive, though. Christ, you’re alive. And now . . . now I sort of want to kill you.”
“Nothing but love for you too, Eden. And I didn’t tell you to come out and get me. I didn’t ask for help.”
“Yeah you did. Like, a dozen times you asked for help.”
“Oh. Well. I meant today. Or yesterday. Whichever. I didn’t ask for help then. There wasn’t any help for Ann Alice, and I could find my own goddamn way out of the undersides. How exactly did you plan to contribute to my survival, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But if you’d drowned, I would’ve felt guilty for years to come.”
“Drowning was the least of my problems,” he said, putting his hands down on his knees, and putting his head down on his hands.
Guilt, I thought.
I sat down next to Christ and tugged at the leg of Nick’s jeans. “Guilt—that’s what it is,” I told him—realizing I was abruptly shifting subjects, but lacking the vitality to summon up a good transition.
“Guilt? Who, Caroline, you mean?” Nick said.
“Yeah,” I nodded, glad that he’d managed to follow my disjointed train of logic. “She’s all et up with guilt, as my aunt would say. She said that they blame her for everything. Maybe it wasn’t just whiny self-flagellation; maybe the fire really was her fault.”
“How?” Nick slipped his back down the glass and it squeaked where his shirt was still damp. When he was sitting next to me, Christ, and Jamie, he added, “If the fire was in 1919, she would’ve been just a kid.”
Jamie piped up then, leaning on the glass instead of sitting to join us. “Kids do stupid destructive things all the time without meaning to.”
“True,” I said. “But how many kids ever do things that stupid? I mean, stupid enough to burn down buildings and kill people?”
Nick looked at me like I’d just beamed down from a pyramid-shaped spacecraft. “Do you even watch the news at all? Ever? Even sometimes, just because I’m on it? That sort of thing happens all the time.”
“I do watch the news sometimes, sure. But never just because youre on it,” I clarified, even though it was practically a bald-faced lie. “I’ve got the Internet, too. Fascinating stuff, real life.”
“Fascinating and fucked up,” Nick said. “More fucked up than you’d ever believe, the stuff that happens every day.”
“Today? Sure. But eighty years ago, a little girl burned down a church full of people? Or maybe,” I thought out loud, “maybe she did something that got the church burned down. She wouldn’t need to have struck the match to feel awful about it. Especially not if . . .”
“What?” Jamie asked. He was still eyeing Christ like a mother hen, but Christ didn’t do anything except sit there and pant.
“Nick, you said—you said you saw a girl. Didn’t you? A little girl, maybe, what—ten or twelve years old? That’s how old Caroline would’ve been, give or take. What if that little girl was a friend of hers?”
Nick bobbed his head slowly, thinking right along with me. “I see where you’re going with this, and I like it. The church burns down and her little friend dies. If she thought it was all her fault—whether it was or not—that could easily be the sort of trauma that would oh, say, make her batshit insane.”
“Thus the ensuing institutionalization.”
“Who? What? Who’s Caroline?” Jamie wanted to know.
Nick tried to fill him in the long way. “Well, about eighty years ago, we think—”
“She’s the Lady in White,” I said, giving him the shorthand that would let him fill in the rest.
“For real? In here? You went looking for her?”
“It was this guy’s idea,” I said, jacking my thumb over at Nick. “And yes, we went looking for her, and yes, we found her. Furthermore, we think she has something to do with what-ever’s going on down at the river.”
“What’s going on down at the river?” Jamie asked.
Christ snorted, but didn’t offer any information on the matter.
“You mean you don’t know?” Everyone seemed to know—even Dave, stuck high on top of Signal Mountain, well out of the reach of any dead, grasping hands.
“Why would I? Becca and me went up the hill back to her place, just like we told you. We found him on the way. I sent her on up, then dragged this asshole from pillar to post, trying to find a shelter that would take him. But they’re disassembling the shelters and moving people out, pushing back farther into the city—away from the river. I figured it was because the water’s still rising.”
“Oh, it’s still rising,” Christ said without looking up. “But that’s not the problem. It’s just the catalyst for the problem. That’s what I think, anyway.”
“Just this once, let’s pretend that what you think might be helpful,” Jamie said. He was joking more than not, but it still sounded harsh. I guess we all sounded harsh, by then. We were all so worn out.
“All right, let’s do,” Christ obliged. His voice dropped to its usual timbre of skepticism and cattiness, and even though it was defensive, it was him—not the tattered little guy who could hardly breathe who had been there a moment ago.
“I know what I saw,” he told us. “They’re zombies, of a kind. They’re dead, and they move, and they kill—but they aren’t totally mindless. They want something, and whatever it is, they can’t have it. So they kill. They kill everyone they can reach.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little alarmist?” My caution came out like flippancy, but it wasn’t.
“Alarmist? Alarmist? Take a look around, for my sake, would you? Look at this place—look at this city. It’s as bad as it can possibly get, isn’t it? But that’s what a tragedy is!”
“What? Settle down, Christ.” Jamie put a hand on his shoulder as if it would hold him down.
“It’s when you think things have gotten as bad as they can possibly get . . . but you’re only halfway there. That’s what a tragedy is. That’s what this is. So the city’s flooded, and that’s bad. That’s really fucking bad, but before TVA came along it used to happen all the time.”
“Not like this.” Nick said it with a certainty that implied he’d looked it up. Maybe he’d been doing some research in his free time.
“Not like this, maybe. But only because there have never been so many people living here. I mean, you can’t look around and say, ‘It isn’t that bad’ because obviously it is. But this—all of this, the people sleeping on the floor, and the police, and the helicopters flying overhead all the motherfucking time, and the lights flashing, and the windows breaking, all of this bullshit—this isn’t even half of it. It’s not even half of how bad it’s going to get when the river gets here.”
It was hard not to be struck silent. Christ was a man prone to hyperbole, but even his vast store of exaggeration wasn’t sufficient to paint the scene.
“I’m talking about fucking zombies, man! Zombies!”
“And . . . now we’ve got to settle down for a little quiet time, don’t we, Christ?” I said, pulling at the towel and pulling him closer to me with it. I wrapped one arm around him and put my mouth against his ear.
“Christ, dear, we believe you. We believe you.”
“You do?” he asked, and he looked up at me with clouded blue eyes, and I thought there was no way in hell he could be thirty years old. He had to be fifteen under all that bravado. He had to be a boy. “You believe me?” He asked it again, and his eyes were watering.
“Yeah, we believe you. We do. We do.”
I held on to him and let him rock back and forth against me, between me and Jamie, who lapped his arm over mine so we could hug him together. Nick looked like he felt left out, but he didn’t offer to join the pile and we didn’t invite him to.
“But,” I whispered down into that manky, wet, rat’s nest of vibrantly fake-colored hair, “right now everybody else doesn’t know yet. And right now, everybody else is trying very hard not to believe, and not to hear. Right now, it’s rumor. Right now, it’s scary shit being passed along from refugee to refugee.”
His autistic rocking lurched itself into a nod.
“No one’s saying this ain’t a mess, and it ain’t bad, because we all know it is. We can look around and see it’s bad. And look—there are official-type people here. They’re getting out everyone they can, starting with the sick, and the families with kids, and with old people. It’s slow but steady. I’ve been watching it all night, starting at the Choo-Choo. It’s not perfect, but it’s working.”
I lowered my voice even farther, and brought my lips even closer to his ear. “But if you keep yelling like this, you’re going to start a panic.”
“And they ought to panic!” He started to rise, but Jamie and I forced him to stay down.
