All Good Children - Catherine Austen [92]
Mom shrugs. “Solar?”
“It could be fish oil for all we know,” I mutter. “Do they have guns?”
The streets are wide and clear. We’re the only car moving. A few ancient vehicles are parked at the curb as if someone might hop in them to deliver pizza at any moment. No one does. You’d think it was three in the morning instead of ten thirty at night.
There are no joggers, no partiers, no criminals, no one.
“Where are all the freaks?” Dallas asks.
“We must be in the wrong part of town,” Mom says.
“Wrong for those who want to find freaks?” I ask. “Or wrong for those who want to stay alive much longer?”
Mom ignores me. Dallas rolls his eyes like he really is my father. I don’t like sitting in the backseat.
“There’s something going on ahead,” Mom whispers.
We’re in the heart of town now. The alleys are strung with colored lights, doorways hung with wreaths of vines and dried apples, stumps of old telephone poles topped with straw dolls shaped into angels and steel wires bent into stars.
People emerge from a building up ahead, dozens of them, maybe hundreds. They pour out of massive double doors onto the sidewalk, pushing strollers and wheelchairs into the street fifty yards ahead of us.
“Were they waiting for us?” I ask.
“It’s a church,” Dallas says. I don’t know if that’s an answer.
They keep coming out, some on crutches, some carrying babies, some with their arms draped around others. They look more united than any people I have ever seen. They fan out along the road and turn to us, caught in our headlights.
Mom idles in front of the church. I stick my face to the window.
Two men in long ministerial robes follow their congregation outside. They stop when they see us, their hands lifted halfway up to their neighbors’ shoulders and held there as if they’re waving. Beside them is a nativity scene made of painted wood and a white sign that lists the hours of Christmas sermons in English, Spanish, Mandarin.
Blankets cover the strollers and wheelchairs and some of the people on their feet. Others wear bulky coats with scarves wrapped around their heads. It’s hard to tell who’s normal and who’s freakish. They don’t look like Freakshow contestants. They just look poor and sick.
They stare at us like they’re scared, like they’ve been caught in headlights before. They don’t scream or surround the car. They don’t beg or steal our stuff. They just stare in silence. And then they step aside. An old woman close to the car waves her arm with a graceful flourish and everyone clears a path for us to travel.
Mom drives so slowly that I make eye contact with people as we pass them. A mother bends over her stroller and raises the enormous head of her deformed child, murmuring soft words and pointing at our car. A girl Ally’s age with bulging eyes lifts her straw angel to my window and makes it dance. I give her a thumbs-up and she smiles. I smile back at her and wave. Suddenly everyone I pass smiles and waves at me, and I hear a hundred shouts of “Merry Christmas!”
“It’s just a town,” I mutter as we leave the crowd behind with their rundown storefronts and heaps of garbage and recycled decorations. “I don’t think the world is exactly what we’ve been told.”
Ally wakes up when we get to the border, like there’s a tracking device in her patch and she’s alerted to the fact that she’s leaving zombie territory.
We glance at her nervously. She looks around but says nothing, asks nothing.
There isn’t one other car at the border. I was expecting long lines of people pacing beside their vehicles, babies crying and moms hushing toddlers, old people asking what’s going on, police ushering suspicious drivers inside for strip searches. But there’s just an empty road blocked off by metal gates with two armed guards standing directly in front of them, staring at our car. A squat brown building to our left houses more police officers, computer networks, jail cells.
“All right, everyone,” Mom says as she pulls into the light. “Someone will ask us questions now. Just answer them calmly.”
Dallas bounces his leg up and down,