Black River Falls by Jeff Hirsch

Author:Jeff Hirsch
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

16

EVERY NIGHT for the next week I left Lucy’s Promise and walked into Black River.

I wandered empty streets, from the shops and apartments near Main Street to the mansions at the north end of town. I tried the doorknob of every house I came to. If it turned, I’d go inside and drift from room to room, imagining myself as one of Benny’s ghosts. I’d lie on unmade beds and sit at dusty dining room tables and on rumpled couches. I went through closets and explored attics and basements, digging out photo albums and children’s toys and stacks of old letters. When I left, I’d put everything back just the way I found it so that it would be like no one had ever been there.

I never wore my mask or gloves, so I avoided any infected I saw, until the fifth night when I came upon a crowd gathered in Monument Park. The bulbs in the streetlights had burned out and never been replaced, so the infected had built a bonfire in the middle of the soccer field. A few dozen people gathered around it, drinking black-market booze and cooking hot dogs over the flames. I found a spot twenty or thirty feet away and crouched in the shadows to watch.

I recognized most of them, but they stood in odd combinations, as if everyone in town had been tossed into a bag, shaken up, and spilled out again. Mrs. Stewart, my sophomore year English teacher, was standing with her arm around the waist of our old mailman, beaming. Mr. and Mrs. Ellery, who’d always been inseparable, were on opposite sides of the group. Mrs. Ellery had been absorbed into an entirely new family, and Mr. Ellery stood alone near the border of the park, looking lost and confused. A few pre-outbreak families had managed to stay together, but they were few and far between. I couldn’t help but wonder where I would have ended up if I’d gotten infected that first night. Would I have a new family? A new name?

A familiar voice called out over the crowd. “Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow, then. No! I have to go! I do! I have to!”

Mom was standing at the edge of a small circle of women. She laughed at something one of them said and then waved and headed toward the park exit. I left my spot and followed from a distance, losing her briefly when she slipped out of the circle of firelight. A second later I saw her climbing the rise that led to the street, and I settled in behind her.

The noise from the park faded as she turned onto Maitland and then Belvedere, where she stopped by a tall white fence. On the other side of it was a grassy slope that was covered with rosebushes. They were overgrown, spilling thorny runners and flowers out over Mom’s head. She reached up for one of the blossoms, but her fingers barely touched the lowest petal. She tried again, and this time it seemed like there was a helium balloon trapped inside her chest.

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