The Book of M Read online

  “Then you talk,” she said. “Please!”

  “A roadblock or a riot, I think,” Naz tried. “Maman, I have to—they’ll hear me.”

  Naz went around. It was the same on the next street. Someone had either shot out the streetlamps or the power grid was starting to fail. All she could see in the glow of the red traffic lights were things running, whipping past each other. Two crashed—a shattering of glass or something. Men screamed.

  “Police!” the police shouted. Sirens burst to life, and a white car materialized out of the night. The mob attacked the car. Then another mob attacked the mob attacking the car, swinging metal baseball bats.

  “Fuck,” Naz gasped.

  “Mahnaz? Are you there?” her mother cried.

  “Maman, shut up!”

  “Okay,” she said more quietly. “I have a map, the tourist map you sent me when you first went. The only neighborhood I haven’t seen on the internet news yet is Dudley Square. This is on the way to the studio? Can you go through there?”

  Naz cinched her bag tighter across her chest. “Okay,” she said. “But no more talking.”

  DUDLEY SQUARE WAS QUIETER, BUT IN A TERRIFYING WAY. THE lights were all out, even in the houses. Naz could see people in their windows by the light reflecting off their eyes from emergency candles. Her legs were so weak the muscles burned cold as she tried to move them, but she kept running. She was too afraid to walk. Please don’t shoot me, she thought. Please see there’s still a little dark thing on the sidewalk following me.

  When she reached the parking lot of the warehouse, there was a single car there, parked in the exact center of the lot. Naz crouched in the hedges at the edge of the property, staring. Was someone inside? Or were they in the building? Would they kill her? Did they have a shadow? The last question sounded so fantastical, so unnatural and horrifying, that she almost giggled hysterically. Her mother waited, breathless. It took Naz fifteen minutes to work up the courage to approach the car, bow drawn. She couldn’t tell until she was right up against the driver’s window that it was completely burned out, to cinders, with only a skeleton at the wheel.

  She used her copy of her perhaps-boyfriend’s key and climbed the stairs to the third floor in pitch-blackness.

  “Are you there yet?”

  “Yes,” Naz panted as she reached the landing. She pushed the door open. Across the gray industrial carpet, she could make out the dim outline of his band’s door, their handwritten name still taped to it. She’d made it. She’d survived the trip.

  She ducked back into the stairwell and vomited everywhere.

  HER MOTHER STAYED ON THE PHONE WITH NAZ UNTIL SHE fell asleep sometime just before dawn. Her mother knew the boy wasn’t there, but Naz didn’t mention him, and she didn’t ask more. Naz was just happy there was someone with her. Well, sort of with her.

  When she woke up, the phone was dead. She uncurled from the floor behind the huge speakers and tried to sit up. Everything ached. It felt like she’d pulled every muscle in her body the night before trying to run there. Maybe she had.

  She crawled over to the wall and plugged her charger into the outlet. When the phone came back to life a few minutes later, there were forty-two messages.

  Are you all right?

  Can you see the news from where you are?

  Text me back if you’re okay.

  They’re saying on the news that the quarantine is going to continue.

  Just let me know you’re still okay.

  Call me!!!

  “I’m okay,” Naz said, but gently, when she picked up.

  Her mother stayed on the line with Naz again for the rest of the day. And the day after that. She never heard from her perhaps-boyfriend. Maybe he’d called his mother, too. Maybe he lost his shadow as soon as it hit Boston. It didn’t really matter. She never called him either, in the end.

  The day after that, her sister, Rojan, was on the line as well, both she and her mother crouched over her mother’s mobile phone placed faceup on the kitchen table, shouting slowly and loudly so Naz could understand them. Naz broke down sobbing when she first heard Rojan’s voice. She’d left Tehran University as soon as she could put all her research on hold, and took the first bus to their mother’s home.

  “What about your studies?” Naz had asked her.

  “Fuck my studies,” Rojan said, to which her mother clucked her tongue, but for once didn’t admonish her daughter for cursing. “Just deal with the fact that you need us, for once.”

  Naz slowly explored the rest of the warehouse to make sure no one else was inside. Her mother ordered her to raid the staff refrigerator on every floor and eat everything in there first, and save her packed nonperishables. For breakfast, Naz had birthday cake, egg salad, and pickles. Rojan told her to turn on the laptop she found on top of the drum case, but its battery was dead and the charger was nowhere to be found, so her mother and sister relayed updates to her from the news on their television set instead. Cases had now been spotted in Wyoming, New Hampshire, California, and the D.C. area. Planes had been grounded, interstates closed. Some cities were practically under martial law. Sometimes the three of them didn’t say anything at all. They just stayed on the line together. Every four hours, Naz went back to the wall outlet and lay on the floor while her phone was plugged in, to charge it back up before the call cut out.

  “Where exactly is this studio?” Rojan kept asking her. “How do you spell Dorchester Street?” She became obsessive about it, about being able to pinpoint Naz’s exact location. “What does the building look like? How many stories? What shape? What color is the outside?” She asked so many questions that their mother finally shouted at her to get her maps and pens out of the way or she was going to throw them all in the trash, and started knocking what sounded like stacks of paper off the table as they argued.

  “I know what you’re doing. Don’t try to come here,” Naz whispered into the phone to Rojan late that night, after their mother had fallen asleep.

  “I won’t,” Rojan replied.

  “I mean it. Don’t try to find me. It won’t help anything.”

  “I won’t,” Rojan repeated, but Naz knew she was lying.

  “Tickets are thousands of dollars anyway. The airports—”

  “How much?” Rojan interrupted.

  “I don’t know, like probably twenty or more thousand to fly in now, because no one wants to come near,” Naz answered.

  “Fuck.”

  “And Boston airport is closed and under quarantine, I’m sure,” she finished. She dropped her voice lower. “I’m serious. I can hear people dying out there. It’s not safe. Don’t come.” She tried to think of something she could say that would force her sister to listen. “Stay with Maman. Don’t leave her alone. Don’t make it so that she has two daughters here instead of just one. Okay?”

  Rojan made a small sound, like Naz had physically hurt her. “So what, you’re just going to be alone over there, trying to survive without any help?”

  “What would you coming do anyway?” Naz asked.

  “I don’t know, but something. Anything,” she said. “You’re my sister, Mahnaz.”

  “Don’t come, Rojan,” Naz warned. “Don’t leave Maman.”

  She could hear Rojan breathing slowly on the other end of the line. It sounded like she was trying not to cry. “Okay, I won’t come,” she finally said.

  “Promise,” Naz ordered.

  “I promise.”

  Naz settled back against the wall and cradled the phone between her ear and shoulder. She still didn’t know if she fully believed her sister, but she also knew that if Rojan was still lying, arguing about it further wouldn’t convince her. All it would do was wake their mother up when one of them started shouting.

  “Can you see the stars?” Rojan asked in the silence.

  “From the roof,” Naz said.

  “Go up there.”

  THE DAY AFTER, NAZ WOKE UP TO LIGHT RAIN PATTERING against the windows. I should try to collec
t that for drinking, she thought groggily as she rolled over on the carpet to unplug her phone from the wall. But the charge was barely full.

  Naz called, and her mother picked up crying. She and Rojan already knew from the news that the power had gone out in Boston overnight. “How much battery do you have left?” Was all she said.

  “Seven percent,” Naz answered.

  NAZ LEFT THE EARPIECE IN FOR WEEKS, EVEN THOUGH IT WAS useless. She knew even then that it seemed a little crazy, but she kept talking to them as if they were there. She needed to. “Whew, that was heavy!” she’d say when she finished lugging down water from containers she’d found around the building and put open-faced on the roof. Or “Remember when we found out I’d been accepted to train here?” or “Did you hear that?” when an errant sound had terrified her in the middle of the night. It turned out to be a rat in the ventilation system, not a human.

  Naz asked Rojan which office she should move to when the music studio grew boring and small, then babbled about the pros and cons. She described what other floors looked like.

  She asked her mother if they’d both known what would happen, would she still have cut Naz off to try to stop her from dating? If the shadowlessness had never come, would she have held out until she died, or given up and reached out? She asked if she might try to be better to Rojan than she had been to Naz, if Rojan wanted something else someday, too. Slowly, slowly, Naz stopped talking.

  Orlando Zhang

  AS SOON AS IT WAS LIGHT ENOUGH TO SEE, ORY SPRINTED. Out of the shelter, down the mountain, all the way to the first ruin of road. That’s where he stopped, jerked to a halt at the edge of that asphalt path.

  He had no idea which way Max had gone.

  The sun was out, burning so bright everything was white instead of yellow. It made the blow to the back of his head from the night before throb painfully. East, toward downtown Arlington, and then past the river to D.C., was slightly more traversable. West, toward Fairfax County and all the western cities like Falls Church and Oakton and Centreville, was overgrown and wild. Ory gritted through the headache, studying the ground for tracks, but there weren’t any. There was too much grass and rock and not enough dust to see any footprints Max might have left.

  How much of her memory had she lost, exactly? Even if it had been a devastating amount, there had to be some figment of it left that would have made her choose one path over the other. A spray of birds shot across the sky from one tree to another, screeching, then disappeared into the leaves. But what if whatever remained wasn’t a part he knew?

  The birds chattered again, and then fell silent. Every second that went by was a day. How far could a person who didn’t know where they were going get? No explanation, no clues, no map. She had vanished without a single trace, as silently and mysteriously as had her shadow.

  Where did the shadows go? Ory wondered. He didn’t even care about the why anymore. Only the where. The why was inexplicable. Ory didn’t believe in magic, but he knew in his heart that what had happened was nothing that could be understood by humans. It was no natural disaster, no disease, no biological weapon. The best name he’d ever heard for it was curse. Because in the end it didn’t matter who you were. No one escaped—either because they were someone who lost their shadow, or because they were someone who loved someone who lost their shadow.

  Ory gritted his teeth. It was impossible to hope now, but he had to believe that the person he was chasing was still Max. Otherwise what would be the point of trying to find her? And if he was chasing Max, then there was only one direction she would have chosen. She’d try to go home. Not the shelter, but their real home. The apartment where they’d lived in D.C., before the Forgetting. Before they’d gotten in the car that weekend so long ago to drive into Virginia for Paul and Imanuel’s wedding. Before everything.

  Ory held his breath and ran east, straight into the low-hanging morning light, as if he could outrun his terror. If he could just make it far enough, the rising sun would turn into a bridge, and then he’d be in D.C. And Max would have to be there. She’d have to be.

  THAT’S WHAT HE TOLD HIMSELF UNTIL HE COULDN’T RUN anymore.

  Odricks Corner had turned into a willow forest, curtains of leaves everywhere. For some reason, the sidewalks had been refashioned into spirals. Ory rested only long enough for the sweat to dry across his forehead. He went on with the gun out then.

  Since Paul and Imanuel’s wedding, neither he nor Max had returned to their apartment. She had wanted fiercely to go back, but it was too dangerous. Before the news went down, they’d seen the scenes from Boston, San Francisco, D.C.—fires, looting, roving gangs. There was plenty of food at Elk Cliffs Resort from the wedding, and the slope of the mountain provided natural protection.

  Over the years, as more and more of the other guests disappeared, or left to try to make it to their own homes, Ory became convinced that only their mountain was safe. Who knew what was lurking there in the east, in the great silent black hole that had been their capital. For a moment, he remembered the strange group he’d met on Broad Street, what their leader, Ursula, had said. Bad things. Bad things are happening in D.C.

  THERE WAS A RUSTLING IN THE HEDGES ALONGSIDE OLD Cedar Road. Ory didn’t like it there, in that part of Arlington. Houses lined both sides of the street, set far back, with low-hanging trees. No one was inside, but the shades behind the windows blinked languidly on their own from time to time, like drowsy eyelids. On the side of one garage, someone had scrawled in charcoal The Dreamless One and The One Who Gathers.

  There was more movement, a nervous shuffling. Ory looked and saw no dark shape there under the trembling leaves. He raised the gun and ran.

  HE CROSSED UNDER THE I-495 IN LATE EVENING. WOULD MAX have made it as far east as McLean in one day? Perhaps, but no farther. Ory had scoured the ground for signs of her as he went—a dropped supply he might recognize from their stash, a tear of familiar clothing, even a footprint—but had found nothing. Nothing from anyone at all, even. There was a shoe that had been in the gutter so long it was fossilized in mud. A ways after, there had been a bone, but it was old. So old he did not have to look away as he passed it.

  In the night, Ory heard something inhumanly heavy cross the interstate, walking over the top of the overpass instead of below. He huddled closer to the dank concrete wall as it passed. Even with the moon, it was so pitch-black, he could not have seen if there was a shadow or not. He didn’t try to look. He held the wall and prayed the sound above would move on.

  IN THE MORNING, HE CLIMBED ONTO THE OVERPASS TO SEE what might have been there. But there were only wildflowers and a single car tire.

  THE MORNING AFTER THE BOSTON EMERGENCY BROADCAST, I opened my eyes to the worst hangover I’ve ever had. Dim flashes of the night before returned. Marion, my best friend from high school who’d become almost as close to Imanuel as she and I were to each other, calling for calm. Jay “Rhino” White, someone’s plus one—although we never quite figured out whose—declaring himself captain of an investigative scouting team he’d just created. Paul saying, “Fuck this, I’m getting the champagne,” and going to get it. All of it. “If this is the last day on earth, we can’t waste a drop.” Do you remember that? I had to agree with him.

  It all became a blur after the eighth glass. At some point during the night, I’d managed to get myself to our guest suite, pull the blankets and pillows off our bed, bring them back downstairs into the ballroom, and pick us out a spot on the east edge, in the corner where the wood wall met the glass one. I woke up with my face buried in your tuxedoed shoulder, which smelled of Bollinger, candle smoke, and cinnamon, somehow. The light through the trees was so clear it was blinding. Sharp, piercing beams cut through the branches and seared white shapes into the dark grass.

  The news was still on the TV in the corner, the volume lowered so that only the people clustered beneath it could hear, to allow the rest of us to sleep. I tried to blink the world back into focus. Capitol Hill was on the screen, a
nd then the Golden Gate Bridge replaced it, some kind of ticker running below.

  “Ory.” I nudged your arm. “Wake up.”

  You sat up slowly, but by the time you were fully upright, you looked alert. “What happened? Where else?” you asked. We both turned back to the TV.

  “You’re awake,” Rhino said when he saw us sitting. I noticed Paul, Imanuel, and Marion already standing awkwardly next to him, as if ordered to be there. “Volunteer?” he asked hopefully.

  That was how we became the first scouting party for the Elk Cliffs Resort survivors.

  “They’re for the occasional bear or wolf that wanders too close to the grounds,” the resort maître d’, Gabe, said as he unlocked the STAFF ONLY closet. He brought out two shotguns and one hunting rifle. “Not even occasional, very rare. Very rare,” he corrected himself on instinct, still thinking of us as luxury guests. Maybe we all still did as well.

  “How many bullets do we have?” Rhino asked.

  “Enough for an exploratory trip down the mountain,” Gabe replied.

  “Enough for hunting when we run out of food?”

  “That’s getting a little ahead of ourselves,” Ory said.

  Rhino shrugged. “Is it, though?”

  “What will the rest of us use?” I interrupted. There were six of us—you, Rhino, Paul, Imanuel, Marion, and me—and only three guns.

  “Well, I can actually shoot,” Marion said. The others all looked at her. “I grew up on a ranch in Texas. A little cattle ranch. What?”

  “Okay, one for Marion, one for me,” Rhino said. “Imanuel?”

  “Give it to Ory,” Imanuel offered politely.

  “Give it to Max,” Paul overrode him. You rubbed the back of your head, cheeks reddening.

  It was not the right time to smile. Paul and I tried not to, without much success.