Chosen Ones Page 3

  Portland Bugle

  DISASTER STRIKES PORTLAND; DEATH TOLLS IN THE TENS OF THOUSANDS

  by Arjun Patel

  PORTLAND, AUGUST 20: A weather event tentatively classified as a hurricane struck Portland, Oregon, on August 19, causing widespread flooding and destruction of homes and buildings. If the classification stands, this would be the first tropical hurricane in recorded history to hit the West Coast.

  With death tolls estimated to be as high as 50,000, this would be the deadliest natural disaster in the history of the United States, second to the Topeka Calamity earlier this year, which at final count claimed almost 20,000 lives. No definitive explanations for the Topeka Calamity have yet been offered.

  The weather event has so far baffled scientists, who cite the low temperatures of the Pacific Ocean as the reason for the lack of hurricane activity on the West Coast. “Hurricanes feed on warm water temperatures,” says Dr. Joan Gregory, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “One thing that might account for this is climate change, but we haven’t heard of anyone recording significantly higher temperatures in the Pacific Ocean recently. This seems like a freak occurrence.”

  More information will likely become available as the recovery effort continues. A candlelight vigil for those lost will be held in Pioneer Courthouse Square at 8:00 p.m. on Thursday.

  Rochester Observer

  FIGURE SPOTTED IN THE MIDST OF DISASTER; CONSPIRACY THEORIES SPREAD LIKE WILDFIRE AS REPORTS OF DARK FIGURE EMERGE

  by Carl Adams

  ROCHESTER, DECEMBER 7: “Everything was bedlam,” says Brendan Peterson of Sutton, Minnesota, one of the survivors of the attack on Minneapolis that claimed almost 85,000 lives earlier this year. He was right in the center of the destruction and describes a hellscape of wind and flying debris. “I saw a woman come apart right in front of me,” he recounts, his hands trembling. “I’ve never seen anything like that before, never, not even in movies.”

  Brendan credits his survival to “sheer luck,” and he is not alone. Several of the more outspoken survivors of the attack have offered similar tales of horrific death, each more gory than the last. But they all have one thing in common: each survivor saw the figure of a man moving confidently through the destruction.

  “I guess it could have been a woman,” says George Williams, another Sutton resident and neighbor of Brendan Peterson. “But anyway, it looked like a person. Eeriest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  The disasters are being classified as “attacks” by the U.S. government, but the perpetrators have not yet been identified. Theories have surfaced on the internet, ranging from the plausible (terrorists, agents of hostile foreign governments) to the downright absurd (aliens, a wrathful divine being).

  “He was hard to see, though,” Brendan clarifies later, referring to the figure he saw during the Minneapolis attack. “Dark from head to toe. I’m not crazy. I saw what I saw.”

  3

  THE MAYOR’S SPEECH was a collection of trite phrases about moving on from grief and the triumph of good over evil and honoring the dead. Halfway through, Ines leaned over to whisper a quote from Friday Night Lights—“Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose”—and Sloane had to cover her mouth so no one in the crowd could tell that she was laughing. Albie faked a coughing fit, and Esther elbowed Ines in the ribs. Matt schooled his face into a serious expression. For just a moment, Sloane felt like she had gotten something back.

  Cameras flashed everywhere as the speech concluded, and the crowd applauded. Sloane joined them, clapping until her palms started to itch. Next came a series of firm handshakes, and finally, it was time for the Chosen Ones to bless the Ten Years Monument with their holy footsteps or whatever the hell Mayor Clayton had said about it. Sloane wondered if she could use that as an excuse to take off her shoes, because they were pinching her toes. Surely you couldn’t bless something with uncomfortable high heels on.

  The land around the metal box had been paved with concrete. Sloane walked down the steps of the stage and felt the warmth of it through the soles of her shoes. She felt like she was standing on the surface of a gray sea, the monument a bronze island one hundred yards ahead of her. It was the only spot of warm light in the midst of desolation—ethereal, mirage-like. Staring at it, she was surprised to find tears in her eyes. In time, the bronze would age, its luster giving way to flat green tarnish. Their memory of what happened would flatten, too, and become dull, and the monument would be forgotten, something for school field trips and bus tours for the history-minded.

  And she would tarnish too. Always famous but always fading, the way old movie stars were, carrying ghosts of their younger selves in their faces.

  It was a strange thing, to know with certainty that you had peaked.

  She walked in Albie’s wake to the box, the others at her back. She couldn’t help but look across the river to where Matt had stood during their last stand, the Golden Bough held aloft, casting super­natural light on his face. One of a handful of moments in which she had fallen in love with him.

  There was a narrow opening in the wall for people to step inside, and Albie went straight through it. Ines was about to follow him in, but Sloane stopped her with a hand. “Let’s give him a second,” she said.

  They all fit together in different ways, knew different pieces of each other best. Esther knew how to make Albie laugh, Ines could almost read his mind, and Matt knew how to get him to talk. But Sloane was the Albie expert on his bad days, and there was no way today wasn’t one of them.

  “This thing is totally going to get peed on,” Ines said.

  “You don’t need to fill every silence,” Matt said.

  “I’m gonna go in and see if he’s okay,” Sloane said. “Give me a minute or two.”

  Matt said, “Sure.”

  “Yeah, it’ll give Esther time to figure out the right camera angle or whatever,” Ines said.

  Esther smacked her arm, then took out her phone. Sloane fled the scene before Esther could talk her into another selfie, finding the gap in the wall and slipping into the monument.

  Tiny letters—the name of every person killed by the Dark One—were carved out of the metal walls. It had taken years to find and cut them all, according to the artist, and most names were so small you could barely read them. The artist had set up panels of light behind the metal sheets so each name glowed. It was like staring at a night sky somewhere deep in the wilderness, where pollution didn’t interfere with the light of the stars.

  Albie stood in the middle of the cube, staring at one of the wall panels.

  “Hey,” she said to him.

  “Hey,” he said. “Pretty in here, isn’t it?”

  “The bronze was a good choice. Almost cozy this way,” she said. “Did you find your dad’s name?”

  “No,” he said. “Needle. Haystack.”

  “Maybe we could ask the artist.”

  Albie shrugged. “I think the point is, you’re not supposed to be able to see the individual names. You’re just supposed to get an impression of how many there were.”

  So many it stopped mattering, Sloane thought. She already knew the number of people lost to the Dark One. Anything from one hundred to one million was just a number, her mind too limited to really comprehend it.

  “I like it this way,” Albie said. “It reminds me that we’re just a handful of people who lost something among thousands of other people who lost something. Not hurting any more or less than any of the families of these people.”

  He gestured to the panel in front of him. Albie was only thirty, but his hair had gone feather-light and was receding at the temples. There were creases in his forehead, too, deep enough that she had noticed them. Time was wearing on him.

  “I’m tired of being special,” Albie said with a shaky laugh. “I’m tired of being celebrated for the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

  Sloane went to stand next to him, close enough that their arms touched. She thought of t
he stack of government documents in the bottom drawer of her desk, of Rick Lane discussing her like she was a slab of meat at a butcher, of the nightmares that chased her from sleeping to waking.

  “Yeah,” she said through a sigh. “I know what you mean.”

  Or at least, she thought she did. But when she watched Albie’s hand tremble as he brought it up to scrub at his face, she wondered if she really did know.

  “Knock-knock!” Esther said. She was holding up her phone—at a flattering angle, of course—as she walked into the monument, her hair arranged perfectly over her shoulders. She turned so the shot included Albie and Sloane. “Say hi to my Insta! followers, guys!”

  “Is this live?” Sloane asked.

  “No,” Esther said.

  Sloane glanced at Albie and then put up both her middle fingers while Albie put his palms up to his cheeks to make a loud farting noise. Ines walked in after Esther, looking nervous, to see Sloane waving her middle fingers around Albie’s face. Esther put the phone down, scowling.

  “That was supposed to be a live capture of my first time through the Ten Years Monument!” she said. “Now I’m gonna have to do it again and act like it’s the first time.”

  She stormed out, passing Matt on her way.

  “What’d I miss?” he said.

  “Hold on,” Albie said, touching a finger to his lips.

  Esther came in again, the phone held up and away from her face, her eyes wide in faux-wonder as she looked at the glowing names. Albie darted forward and tipped his head so he was in the shot with Esther and said, “This is her second time doing this! Don’t let her lie to you—”

  Esther shoved Albie away and put her phone down. “What is wrong with you guys?”

  “Us? You’re the one who basically has a phone grafted to your hand!” said Sloane. “You’re worse than Matt.”

  Matt put up his hands. “I am not involved in this.”

  “I’m not the first person to use social media!” Esther said. “It’s my job, you don’t have to be so freaking judge-y about it.”

  “This is supposed to be a somber occasion,” Matt pointed out. “And it could have been a good bonding experience—”

  “Recording it doesn’t take away its somberness,” Esther said.

  “It does when you’re recording from the ideal selfie angle,” Ines said, miming holding up a phone. She posed with her hip thrust to the side. “ ‘Here’s the names of the dead and also my hot ass.’ ”

  Sloane couldn’t suppress a giggle. It came out so high-pitched, she clapped a hand over her mouth, embarrassed.

  “Sloanie Sloanie Macaroni just made a girlie noise,” Albie said, eyebrows raised.

  “Don’t you dare call me that,” she said.

  “Don’t pretend we haven’t all seen you in those home videos Cameron made,” Esther said. “You may be into this tough-girl-don’t-give-a-fuck thing now, but deep inside you will always be the kid who did a dance to ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ in a tutu made of tinfoil.”

  Sloane cursed her late brother’s video camera and was about to respond when Matt spoke up. “I found Bert.”

  Bert’s real name wasn’t Robert Robertson, of course. He had told them his real one in confidence a few months before his death so they could find him if they lost contact with him. But none of them thought of him as Evan Kowalczyk; to them, he would always be Bert.

  They all moved to stand behind Matt and followed the line of his finger to a small name: EVAN KOWALCZYK, all in capital letters. She had no idea how Matt had found it among all the names, all the panels. It was like finding a particular tree in a forest of identical trees. Matt’s hand fell away, and Robert’s name disappeared into the wall again, blurring together with all the others.

  All these losses—each one for nothing. A dark lord and his insatiable hunger.

  “I wonder what he’d be doing now,” Matt said.

  “Probably refusing to enjoy his retirement,” Ines replied.

  Sloane turned toward the door before her expression gave her away. She didn’t want to tell them what she had read in the files she had gotten from the FOIA request, hints of a Bert she had never known.

  “Let’s go,” Sloane said. “They’re going to start to wonder where we are.”

  4

  THE INVITATION to the gala was taped to their refrigerator: CELEBRATE TEN YEARS OF PEACE. As if the defeat of the Dark One had brought harmony to the entire world. It hadn’t, of course, but for the United States, at least, it had been a reason to withdraw from everything. A new era of isolationism, the headlines had called it. The reactions had been . . . mixed. One side had celebrated withdrawing troops from other countries but protested pulling out of international peacekeeping organizations. The other side had cheered the closing of borders but resisted the decreased military presence abroad. Regardless of where on the spectrum they fell, everyone had shared the same paranoia. No one knew where the Dark One had come from, which meant he could have come from anywhere. He could have been a friend or a neighbor, a refugee or an immigrant. Even Sloane’s mother had gotten a licensed handgun and practiced at the shooting range once a month, as if that had ever helped anyone against the Dark One, who had made guns collapse from within, like imploding buildings, warping and twisting the metal without even touching it. Sloane couldn’t help but wonder how long it would take ARIS to harness the same power for themselves. If they hadn’t already.

  Sloane took her dress out of the closet and hung it on the door. It was a gold-beaded gown that looked like something out of the twenties. It would be heavy on her shoulders, so she didn’t intend to put it on until the last second. On a normal day, she wouldn’t have bothered with anything so fancy, but Sloane loved formal occasions—not that she would have admitted that to anyone. Earlier, she had even hidden in the bathroom to watch one of Esther’s Insta! beauty tutorials for winged eyeliner. If Esther ever found out, Sloane would never live it down.

  The unfortunate formfitting nature of the beaded dress meant she had to find the item of clothing she most dreaded in the world: shapewear. The greatest wrangler of women’s minorly imperfect torsos since the corset. The last thing she wanted was to wake up to gossip websites showing increasingly zoomed-in pictures of the bubble of fat around her middle, speculating about the state of her womb. Pregnancy rumors had haunted her as long as she and Matt had been together.

  She couldn’t find the shapewear in her underwear drawer or her sock drawer, so she turned to Matt’s armoire. Sometimes it got lost amid the sea of black boxer briefs that he favored. She dug around in the spandex, and her fingers brushed something small and hard.

  A box, small enough to fit in her palm. Black.

  Shit.

  Sloane glanced at the door—still closed, with no audible movement in the hallway beyond it. Good. She opened the box. Inside was a ring, of course, but not just any ring—it was old-fashioned, dotted with pyrite instead of diamonds. He had remembered what kind of jewelry she liked even though she never wore any.

  She snapped the box closed and shoved it back in the drawer, her throat tight. She knew what it meant, of course: he was going to propose to her. Soon, probably, because he wouldn’t trust the underwear drawer as a good hiding place for long. Given his fondness for dramatic gestures, he would likely do it at the gala that evening.

  Sloane felt sick with dread. She opened the door and peered down the hallway. Matt was on the phone with his assistant, Eddie. His calendar was stuffed to bursting with causes. This week alone, he was moderating a panel discussion on mass incarceration, attending a fund­raising event for a school on the west side, and meeting with a senator about state-funded counseling services for Dark One survivors with PTSD. He would likely be on the phone for a while.

  She shut the door again and sat on the edge of the bed, staring out at the two-flat across the street, the one with the gaudy blue fairy lights hanging from the eaves all year round.

  Sloane took out her phone and diale
d a number she hadn’t used in years. Her mother’s number.

  “Hello?” June Hopewell said, her voice sharp as ever.

  “Mom?”

  “Sloane?”

  Sloane frowned. “Yeah, it’s me, unless you’ve got some other kids running around I’m not aware of.”

  “Saw you on the TV this morning,” June said. “You sure you don’t want to rethink that whole ‘no autographs’ policy? Looked like you were being chased by wolves.”

  “Yeah, Mom. I’m sure.” Sloane didn’t think her mother actually cared whether she signed autographs or not, but ever since the defeat of the Dark One, she had weighed in on everything Sloane did, maybe in an attempt to make up for her nonexistent parental influence when Sloane was growing up. She had, after all, missed out on Sloane’s entire adolescence due to not giving a single shit when the government came to take her away.

  “Listen, there’s something I want to talk to you about,” Sloane said. “I just found a ring in Matt’s underwear drawer. An engagement ring.”

  Her mom was quiet on the other end of the line. Then: “Okay. And?”

  “And?” Sloane clapped a hand to her forehead. “And I’m freaking out!”

  “Slo, you’ve been together for ten years.”

  Sloane’s face got hot. “We’ve never even talked about it! Don’t you think that if he wanted to marry me, he would, you know, bring up the subject of marriage casually at some point? For all he knows, I hate the entire institution on principle.”

  “While that would not be at all surprising, given the number of things you do hate,” June said, a hint of amusement creeping into her voice, “maybe he wanted to keep it a surprise.”

  Sloane watched a cat prowl along the curb outside.