Page 29 of The Dead of Summer

Pfaff marches us right through the double doors of the community room, interrupting Wendy just as she’s getting to the end of The Rainbow Fish . Seeing the harpoon gun at my back, Wendy drops her singsong voice and stands up.

“Imogen, what are you doing?”

Dr. Pfaff knows Wendy well. She makes me get on my knees, right in front of the whimpering children, and she rests the point of the harpoon against the back of my neck. I’m left looking up into a crowd of candlelit faces. They draw away from me, whispering.

“What did they do?”

“Should we run?”

“What’s happening? What’s happening?”

And gradually, from a place so deep in the shadows that the candlelight can’t reach it, the doomsday people begin to pray.

“And the dead in Christ will rise first, then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air …”

Dr. Pfaff speaks in clear, precise words. “These three have broken our rules for a second time. I found them sneaking outside, once again jeopardizing the safety of this sanctuary.”

“That’s not what happened!” I start, but Pfaff presses the harpoon deep into the soft of my neck, forcing me almost to the floor.

“How is that fair?” Pfaff asks the room. “How can any of us expect to feel safe when our leader is playing favorites? The rules apply to all of us, or none of us. Is that not how we voted?”

“Imogen, please, I’m sure there’s an explanation for this,” Wendy says. I twist to see her through the wall of wobbling candlelight between us. Her rifle is nowhere near her, but if anyone can handle an unruly crowd with words alone, it’s Wendy Pretendy.

“Is this true? Did you go outside again?” Wendy asks Elisa.

“Yes, but—”

The whispers turn into a low roar.

“Outside? Again?”

“Have they been tested?”

“Why did she let them back in here?”

Even as Pfaff quiets down the audience, the prayer weaves tension into the air.

“In the making of the world, an angel came down from heaven with a key to the abyss, to seal back the Leviathan, and so it shall be in the unmaking that the angel will return, and the Leviathan will rise to cleanse the world in flood.”

Dr. Pfaff has to speak louder to be heard by all. “The children show no signs of infection … yet. But I for one am curious what was so important in the storage units that they would break our quarantine yet again and risk the lives of everyone here.”

The question is perfectly worded to stoke the whispers again. Like a school of fish, all the frantic curiosity suddenly coalesces into a united shape: “We deserve to know the truth!”

“Imogen, please,” Wendy says. “Don’t do this.”

Imogen raises up the digital recorder and plays the latest file. Scary Mary’s voice is as faint as creaking trees, but the quiet she speaks into is profound.

“Willy has been in and out of here, taking care of me. Tell him thank you for me? He’s a kind one. Too kind. Asked him to kill me ages ago but he won’t.”

“That,” Imogen states, “is an infected individual Willy has been keeping captive in the storage container out back.”

“She isn’t captive!” Wendy shouts, realizing her mistake a second too late.

The few adults holding on to hope shake their heads in disbelief.

Wendy faces their doubts head-on. “Listen to me. There is still so much we don’t know about what is happening outside, but we cannot assume the infected are beyond treatment.

Mary was fighting her infection! And I have heard from other pods of survivors that they are witnessing the same thing. It’s not deadly—”

“Liar.” Pfaff starts the chant, and it spreads into the mouths of the adults throughout the room. I bite down on my bottom lip and, despite the stab of pain in my neck, I push myself up.

“It doesn’t matter!” I yell. “Mary is dead now. She died in front of us. We’re safe!”

But no one cares. The panic in the room has risen out of the reach of words.

Everything unsaid in the hushed weeks leading up to this fight spills out, all the adults shouting to be heard at once.

Watching it all fall apart brings me back to the moment that Scary Mary took her last, rattling breath, and her eyes went cloudy, and gradually she began to crumble like a sandcastle.

It’s like the crumbling has reached into the roots of the library, and now the building is about to fall down around us.

Tiff, ever the librarian, swivels like a sprinkler, spraying her shhhhh everywhere. No one but me seems to see or hear her. The adults scream at one another and gradually the children among them lend their own shrieks to the rising panic.

“Quiet. Quiet!” Bash keeps shouting next to me. “We have to be quiet!”

From the front hall comes the sound of glass shattering inward.

The adults halt their bickering. Hands are clapped over the bellowing mouths of infants, trying to get them back under control.

Everyone hangs in a moment of terrible impatience, listening to hear if it’s too late.

Far away, but getting closer, the voices of tremulous song sift into the quiet of the stacks.

I lock eyes with Bash and Elisa.

The weepers are inside.

Dr. Pfaff turns the harpoon gun toward Wendy.

“Give me the keys to the bus. Now.”

“Imogen, I can’t do that. The bus is our only emergency escape. You can’t abandon all these people.”

“I’m not. Several here have already agreed to come with me. This was a long time coming.”

Several adults separate from the mob, standing with Pfaff to make their allegiance known.

A few teens, too. I see now how Pfaff did it—how she posed as a quiet authority in the library and undermined Wendy, how she stoked discord and distrust to bring about her own outcome. We were always within her experiment.

“Anyone who wishes to leave this place will be taken care of at my lab at the institute. We will be safe there, but we must go immediately. The library has already been compromised. Now, the keys.”

Elisa shoves herself in front of Pfaff, ignoring the wicked harpoon.

“Don’t go with her! She can’t be trusted!

” With the offer of escape, Pfaff has completely turned the tide of the panic.

The adults shove Elisa to the ground beside Wendy.

I’m thrown next, then Bash. Now the audience stands behind the director.

She is their only hope in a disaster she herself has brought about.

Wendy reaches into her skirts and, as though handing over her own heart, she gives Pfaff a dangling set of keys.

“Go with her,” Wendy says to us.

Someone in the crowd—the mother named Meeghan—protests. “Not them! They’re infected! They should stay! All of them!”

People give small cheers of agreement. I seek out the faces of other townies, people who have known me my entire life, people who have known Wendy for even longer, and they divert their eyes in shame.

Pfaff’s mouth is an unerring line upon a face of grim determination.

“I’m sorry,” she says to us. “But progress always requires someone to be left behind. You understand.”

Keys in hand, Pfaff backs toward the door.

Wendy pulls herself up to her full height. “Imogen, do not open that door—”

Dr. Pfaff shoulders open the doors, and in rushes the smell of brine and rot. Standing just outside the door is a young boy wearing a bike helmet, but even from a distance I can see it’s badly cracked by an antler of coral shooting up from his crown.

“Kill it, kill it!” someone screams.

“No!”

Wendy bounds over the candles as Pfaff raises the harpoon gun.

Right before the two collide, Pfaff turns, and there’s a crack that sends everyone to the floor.

When I look again, Wendy sways back, a bolt of silver jutting from her sternum.

She stumbles and then falls in slow motion, into the candles.

I rush to her side, swatting at the small fires that burn up in the layers of her skirts. Blood, thick and black, quickly soaks her bodice. I grab the harpoon, but she catches my wrists.

“Don’t.” Her voice is thick with blood. “Leave it in. You need to go.”

People are screaming. Smoke fills the air from where the fallen candles have thrown their flames. I ignore everything, scooping my arms under Wendy so I can drag her upright. She shoves me off. I just try again, until she grabs the sides of my head.

“Ollie. Orlando. Listen to me. You need to take this.”

Sweat dots Wendy’s face, melting her makeup. Her eyes are wide. Fiercely alert. But I can feel the tremor of weakness already in her hand in my hair. She holds up her fist and reveals a key.

“This is the actual bus key,” Wendy wheezes. “But now it’s up to you to get everyone to safety. Go to the docks. There are survivors. Other townies.”

“I’m not leaving you!” I grab for the harpoon again, but Wendy shoves me back just before the little boy with the helmet crawls between us. Somehow Wendy gets a knee under her, and she’s rising.

“I’m right behind you,” she says through gritted teeth. One hand presses where the harpoon juts from her ribs. The other heaves up her rifle. This time when she tells me to run, there is no talking back.

I turn into the smoke, and I run.

The library is a riot of singsong chaos. The heavy barnacles that once blocked the front doors have imploded inward, creating a gaping wound of softened wood. Weepers dance across the hissing crust, grasping and pulling one another, like one gigantic wave of flesh flowing into the stacks.

“Bash!” I call. “Elisa!”

My voice barely pierces the cacophony of scraping, clicking, hiccuping, and screaming.

Survivors scramble over one another, looking for a way out, but I already hear the now-familiar sound of someone choking on the slime forming in their lungs.

It’s only a matter of seconds before the first floor is completely overwhelmed. We need another way out.

Think , I scream at myself. Think.

If the library is flooding with weepers, we need to seek higher ground. That means going up and around to …

“The side stairs! Follow me!” I call out, but as we rush to the staircase I see weepers have already climbed to the second floor.

One weeper, a woman in a sparkly dress that perfectly matches the maroon algae coating her arms and legs, looks back at us. Her mouth splits into a huge smile of blackened teeth as she babbles nonsense. “And in the fall the mountains burn festive colors, and we’ll go apple picking and sip cider!”

She rushes toward me, unseeing, arrested in some illusion that drives her to embrace whoever is closest. I duck, but she catches a boy right behind me. Clive DeMario. He gets a mouthful of her hair as she curls around him.

“Help—help!” Clive calls to me.

“Ollie! Move!”

That’s Bash! At the top of the stairs, through the blockade of weepers, I make out a rumble that makes sense only a split second before I see the edge of the library cart pushed into view.

It teeters at the top of the stairs, captivating the weepers, and then with a final shove it’s crashing over them.

They shatter in slow motion, as brittle as seashells but full of viscous blood that splatters the walls.

I throw myself sideways just before the cart grinds me to a pulp.

I reach back for Clive. He’s on his hands and knees, pulling long strands of goo from his throat.

“Please!” He reaches for me, but we’ve got to keep going.

“Now!” I shout to the survivors following me. There’s a path up the stairs, out of the chaos of the main floor. I charge through the mess, reuniting with Bash and Elisa. There’s no time or space to acknowledge that Wendy has been left behind. The mission she gave us is too important.

“Side staircase,” Elisa is shouting. “Get to the bus!” But she herself won’t run. “Ollie, people are hiding upstairs,” she sobs. “Mostly the little kids.”

We need time to evacuate the library, but at this rate the weepers will have every corner of this place slick with slime in just a few minutes.

If only the doors had held. If only the adults hadn’t been so loud.

If only the weepers could be fought back or slowed down.

But it’s too late. The safe hush of the library has been torn apart by the song of the weepers, soaring as high as the vaulted ceilings.

Like screaming angels.

An idea hits me.

I slap the bloody bus keys into Bash’s palm. “Bash, go to the bus. Get it started. Elisa, get the kids out of here. I’ll buy you time.”

She catches me by the arm. “How, Ollie?”

My idea is insane, but I know it will work. In a way, it’s the very thing I have been training for all my life.

“The performance of a lifetime. Do you trust me?”

My friends hold on to me a second longer, then nod. I shake loose, rushing up the stairs to the third-story landing, where the forgotten organ waits.