The Doomsday Chronicles (The Future Chronicles) Page 2

  I confess that I was afraid to leave the room at first. I feel fear very keenly. Also anger. Other things, not so much. I almost enjoy fear and anger sometimes, though I would never admit that now that I’m old enough to know that upsets people and worse, makes them think poorly of me.

  The shooting lasted a while, but eventually it grew distant and then finally stopped. Or, at least it moved so far away that the sounds of it no longer traveled the distance to my ears. I spent that time looking at my mother, while she looked somewhere else.

  Since I’ve known about her, I’ve spoken with her only a few times and she to me only once. I knew I wouldn’t have another chance once I walked out the door. The balance of the universe will demand she not survive this thing that she’s done. Justice will not likely take the normal route, but it will be meted out. I don’t doubt that.

  I walked up to the window between us and placed my hands against the glass. There was a switch next to it and I made sure that it was set so that I would hear her words if she chose to gift me with them.

  “I only wanted to know you,” I said to her. “I come from you.”

  She didn’t flinch at the gun, or the shots, or whatever happened to her that created the rings of dark blue bruises around her neck and arms as well as blackened her eyes, but she flinched at those words. For the second time in my life, she looked directly at me. It was only a second, maybe less than that, but it was there. I could feel it like a weight.

  “I wish you had been a male child,” she said, and then her eyes shifted again. I knew she would say no more, so I left the room.

  Now, I’m safe again, at least for the moment. No one stopped me or even paid any attention to me as I walked down the halls, skirting the puddles of blood and the crumpled bodies. The monitors in a big room filled with desks all showed the two cells. In one I could see the empty chair I had just been in and in the other, my mother still sat with her bruised face and serene smile.

  Every eye remaining there—and there weren’t many for so many desks—turned my way and looked at me. They all saw. They all knew. One of the women got up and unlocked the doors for me, pushing me outside in my blood-spattered clothes and shoes that left red footprints behind me.

  The woman looked out at the world for a moment. The smell of smoke was in the air, but it wasn’t bad at all. It reminded me of the smell that burning leaves scent the air with each fall. She looked at me for a long moment, her expression unreadable. Then she said, “Go on. That’s your punishment. Go out there and live in it.”

  I wanted to tell her that I didn’t do anything, that none of this was my fault. I didn’t do it. The words curdled in my throat and I just turned away. I walked until I got here.

  This hotel room I’m in is anonymous and cheap. I’m surprised that the hotel is open at all, but the girl at the desk—her belly so swollen that I can see the nub of her belly button through her shirt—merely rubbed her roundness and said, “So long as it’s a woman, why not? No men on their own, though. They aren’t coming for the bodies fast enough anymore.” Then she shrugged, no longer interested.

  On the news, there are only women left in the anchor chairs. One of them seems to have lost some of her mind somewhere, because she’s wearing a man’s suit far too large for her and she keeps smoothing the fabric under her fingers, almost like it’s a security blanket. She keeps crying, but each time she manages to pull herself together again.

  They are talking about my mother and her work, engaging in endless speculation as to why she’s done what she has. They all guess, but none of them truly understands her like I do.

  I sit on the bed and watch the program, but the mirror across from me keeps drawing my attention. I look up and see her blue eyes, the sharp bow at the center of my upper lip that is hers, the arched eyebrow on the right and the smooth, curved eyebrow on the left that is also from her. I have my father’s nose and chin, so there are differences, but in the mirror here, I don’t see them. I see only her.

  On the screen they show another view of the place she worked, and that makes me remember the first time I spoke with her. It was easier to find out where she worked than where she lived, and I waited there in my car instead of attending classes at college. I knew her the moment I saw her, and I watched her cross the lot to the front doors, her steps neat in her equally neat, low-heeled shoes.

  I found myself unable to simply let her enter the building, though I had only intended to see her with my own eyes. I jumped out of the car, raced across the street, and intercepted her before she could enter the building, my hand flat against the glass as she reached for the metal handle.

  She didn’t startle or jump, which is when I knew she was special. Instead, she merely pulled her hand back, tucked one hand into the other and tilted her head a little, her eyes on my spread fingers.

  “My name is Camille. I’m your daughter,” I said. Like this interception, I hadn’t meant to say that either.

  I’m not sure what I expected, but what happened is that my mother looked at me for the only time in my life aside from that brief moment in the cell-like room. Her eyes met mine and I saw her take in my features, the ones so much like hers. Then her eyes shifted, which I now know is the way she moves through this world. Then, I only thought it otherworldly and strange, like a fairy perhaps.

  For a moment, we stood there like we had both been encased in amber, still and waiting to be freed from our prisons. Then she reached for the handle of the door and said, “So you are. Now leave me alone.”

  FIVE – DAY TWENTY

  The news is sporadic now and the hotel is closed. The girl at the front desk left and locked the office, but no one came to remove me, so I stayed. The power has been equally sporadic over the last few days, but it’s on now and I’ve got the air conditioning down as low as it will go to build up some coolness in my room.

  I’ve emptied the vending machines and now have piles of junk food and bottles of warm soda stacked in my room. It’s the only food I have and the stores around here are empty save for broken glass and bodies.

  I’ve filled the bathtub in this room and broken through to the adjoining room so that I have more space and another tub to fill. I’m not sure what will happen next, but there are at least a billion people dead. Those who have not yet died, but know their time is coming, are destroying the world while they can.

  The news anchor—not the one in the man’s suit, she killed herself on-air a few days ago—says that it’s a case of no one having the world if they can’t. I believe that.

  She also reports that this is the first day in years that not a single rape has been reported in New York City. They try to make a joke of it, but it falls flat. They are trying to find a bright side, but there is no bright side. I turn off the TV after that.

  My grandmother has also died. I managed to get a signal long enough to call home, and my aunt answered the phone. She’d been caring for my grandmother as the cancer got worse. I couldn’t do much as I was busy with graduate school. I’d changed my degree to biochemistry after finding out about my mother, and that is one field that demands an advanced degree to achieve success.

  I wanted to follow in my mother’s footsteps, so I had no time for grandma’s cancer.

  My aunt’s voice was strong on the phone. She almost sounded relieved as she conveyed the news. My grandmother died peacefully and in her sleep, entirely without pain, she reported. I don’t believe that at all. I think it must have been horrible or else she wouldn’t take such pains to tell me otherwise.

  She carefully avoided any mention of my father, perhaps not wanting to tell me more bad news. She still doesn’t know about our triangle of tragedy. At first, I expected to see our faces on the news, but the government officials who came to take me clearly didn’t share their knowledge with the media. My father is dead by now, I’m sure. I have no proof of that. I just know.

  Our conversation was short, her asking me if I can come home to help her bury my grandmother in the yard. I
told her that I’m far away and that sufficed for her. There is no gas and even stepping outside is dangerous now. She told me that she loves me, but her voice was uncertain and unsure. She has no children or husband, so she’s alone now. At least she’s spared the same grief the rest of the world is feeling.

  I sprawl out on the bed and think of my grandmother. It was she who told me about my mother after her diagnosis went from cautiously optimistic to something less so. There were no court papers or anything like that—she was far too smart to keep things I might have found as a child—but she had an excellent memory. And she had my birth certificate, with its capitalized UNKNOWN in the space where a mother’s name should be.

  It was then that I understood why she took such pains to keep my birth certificate from me, going to the trouble of bringing it to the college herself. And to the DMV. And everywhere else it might be needed.

  And she had one more thing. A photograph.

  In the image, a group of children posed at a birthday party, all of them happy and smiling, some wearing party hats. She pointed to one girl, a girl who looked remarkably like me, her four front teeth looking large with two gaps next to them where her eye teeth had not yet come in. Her hair was in pigtails and her knees were knobby.

  “This is your mother,” she said.

  I took the photo and examined it, running my finger across the small face. And then I saw someone else familiar. In the back, and much taller than all the rest of the children, stood a young man. I pointed to him and my grandmother nodded. “Yes, that’s your dad,” she said, carefully watching me, her eyes wary and waiting.

  My father was looking at the little girl, but he was smiling like all the rest. It almost looked like she had just said something funny and he was reacting to it. I turned the photo over and saw a date. It was the date that made my mind stop, then turn on a loop.

  My grandmother’s hand came up to rest on top of mine, pushing the photo to my lap. I looked at her and in her eyes was sadness, pity…regret. She said, “You understand that you can’t contact her, right? I signed legal papers, agreements. I made a promise. I just thought you should know.”

  I nodded at her and gave her one of the smiles she liked best. They almost feel natural to me, I’ve been doing them so long, and it didn’t let me down that day either.

  “Good girl,” she said and sighed. “I’m glad you understand. She was just a little girl. None of it was her fault.” Then she reached up, smoothed my hair behind my ear and said, “And I got you.”

  I nodded again and looked at the photo, turning it over to look at the back once again. The date on it was just a year prior to my birth. That little girl in the picture had given birth to another little girl. Me.

  SIX – DAY THIRTY

  The news is gone and the drone of the emergency alert wakes me with a shock every time the power comes back on. It just happened again and I lurch out of bed to fall next to the air conditioner, putting my face directly over the vent so that the mildewy-smelling air that comes out will bathe me in humid coolness.

  It’s hot, oppressively so, but I dare not open the windows. I tried that before and the smell was overwhelming. There are bodies everywhere and the garbage trucks that come past only pick up those lying in the open. There must be some in the hotel if the stench is any indicator.

  I’ve been wearing the same clothes since I got here. I’m disgusting. My mother would never be seen like this, of that I’m sure. I can’t go home. I don’t ever want to go there again. But I’ve got to go somewhere. I’m so sick of junk food and soda.

  I’ve got no books, so I practice my organic chemistry in my head. It’s important to really absorb the basics, so I’ve been obsessive about that. It was hard to switch from psychology to biochemistry, and I had a lot of work to make up, but I did it. I see no reason to let those things slide now.

  For a while, I busy myself by practicing my smile in the mirror. I want it to be just right, just like my mother’s. Not too big, not too small. It must be noticeable, yet not obvious. I don’t have it down yet and my dirty, unstyled hair isn’t helping with the image. Perhaps that’s the key. Perhaps I need the rest of it to make the smile just right. The clothes, the hairstyle, the shiny square purse.

  I’ve been thinking about things while I’m trapped in here, even about my father a little. I spoke with him only once about my mother and it didn’t go well. I can still remember it like it was yesterday instead of three years ago. His answers had been succinct and final.

  “I did my time. Two years in juvie. I’ve got nothing to explain to anyone,” he said. Then he had turned away and the crack of a beer cap sounded out from the kitchen.

  I’ve always felt different, like I wasn’t exactly like the other kids. I had friends in school, but never for long, and I couldn’t figure out why that always happened. Once my grandmother told me about the circumstances of my birth, I thought I had the answers as to why. Still, I wanted to know more. That’s when I began my journey to learn everything I could about my mother.

  I joined my mother’s gym and watched how she worked out, changing my workout to enhance our similarities. I shopped where she shopped, watched her with her friends, and made sure she was safe at night, parking outside so that no one could approach her house without me seeing them. I even applied for an internship at her place of employment, for her study specifically. I thought I was very eloquent, but I received only a curt rejection.

  She was working on the source of human aggression, a treatment for those with uncontrolled aggressive impulses that didn’t need to rely on a constant supply of medication. A genetic fix that could be given easily to anyone who could not control themselves. I wanted to help her with that. I wanted to work under her guidance, to become all that I knew I had inside me by virtue of her blood in my veins.

  I thought that perhaps I was approaching her incorrectly, that perhaps I needed to know more about how I came into this world. It wasn’t easy information to find. There are a remarkable number of cases involving Little Girl Doe in this world of ours. Still, no amount of anonymizing can entirely erase the details of a case like hers.

  I read all that I could, hoping that something inside one of those stories would show me the path to her heart, because surely there was one. I just wasn’t finding it. I wasn’t taking the right steps on that path, skipping the right stones. The stories about the eleven-year-old who had been raped, stabbed, and left for dead were there, but vague and devoid of the details I needed. In time, those stories changed to ones about the eleven-year-old pregnant girl and her fourteen-year-old attacker.

  Those made for interesting reading.

  I found most information dealt with her pregnancy and the court case surrounding it. The hospital had finally sued for custody, insisting that Little Girl Doe was at unreasonable risk of death if the pregnancy went to term. On the opposing side were her parents, who objected and refused. The parents won. Lucky for me.

  There was less on the court case dealing with the boy they called Attacker Doe, the fourteen-year-old eventually sentenced to two years in juvenile prison and extensive counseling. My father.

  And then…nothing. No amount of searching or clever keywords produced a single hit on my mother until adulthood, and then only snippets about her work or studies. Though I was loathe to be separated from her for so long each day, I took a volunteer position in the hospital where I was born.

  After a few months of volunteer work, I eased my way into helping in the records section. There, I found her records in the deep archive vault. I read about the temporary paralysis, the loss of her reproductive organs, the stroke that left her in a coma just this side of death.

  Inside the file I also found a photo. Written along the bottom was the date. The date of my birth. I looked at it closely to see what I might see. My mother was so small and slight, rolled onto her side with a belly so big it looked fake. Her eyes are taped closed, a tube in her mouth. I was born early, and I suppose now I understand why. I
copied the records and tucked the photograph of her under my pillow along with them, hoping to dream of her each night.

  No matter how much I think about it or look for flaws in my reasoning, I can find none. I did what anyone who loved another person would do. I found out all I could and tried to make her understand that I was there for her, tried to approach her in just the right way. I don’t know why it didn’t work.

  And now? Now she’s done something terrible, and I’m not sure I’ll ever get another chance to try and win her over. If I do, I’ll tell her that I forgive her. I’ll tell her that I love her no matter what she’s done.

  SEVEN – DAY SIXTY

  The power came back on today for two hours and when it did, the news was back. The women at the news desk wore jeans and t-shirts, their hair back in ponytails and their eyes without make-up. They both tried to smile, but they shouldn’t have because it didn’t look right at all.

  The one with the dark ponytail looked into the camera and said, “We’ve all suffered unimaginable losses, but we have to try. We have to try to carry on.”

  I agreed with her, and watched the news carefully after that, wanting to do right by her.

  And now the pregnant girl is back at the hotel, too. Her belly is so huge it looks like my mother’s hospital photo. She’s standing at the door to my room with a smirk on her face and telling me that I can stay, so long as I help her fix the damage and help her with the hotel in general. I shrug and she wrinkles her nose at me, her eyes darting toward the wide sweat stains on my shirt.

  “You should go home and get some clothes. Can you go home? Are you far away from it?” she asks.

  “Not so far,” I say. “But there’s no gas.”

  She glances down at my wrist, then points at it and says, “You can get ten gallons now. They’ll stamp you after so you don’t get more.”

  I look back at my room, with its pile of bags filled with wrappers and soda bottles. “You won’t give away my room, will you?”