Pandemic Page 6

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said.

Margaret looked to her desk, to the framed pictures of the people she’d lost. A picture of Dew Phillips in a jacket and tie just like Clarence’s, although Dew’s looked like he’d been wearing it for days. Dew’s crescent of red hair looked similarly disheveled; he stared at the camera as if he was just waiting for an excuse to beat the s.h.i.+t out of the photographer.

Next to Dew’s frame, a picture of Margaret sitting at a table with the short, pale-skinned Amos Braun, warm smiles on both of their faces, arms around each other, half-empty gla.s.ses of beer in front of them. Five years on and the photo didn’t make her think of the good times: she could only see his expression of panic, the life fading from his eyes as his blood sprayed against the inside of a biohazard suit visor.

And the final picture: a framed cover of Sports Ill.u.s.trated. A ma.s.sive football player dressed in the maize-and-blue uniform of the University of Michigan, tackling a white-jerseyed player wearing a silver helmet with crimson dots. Dirt and gra.s.s streaked the Michigan player’s oversized arms. The block letters at the bottom of the cover read: “So good it’s SCARY: Perry Dawsey and the Wolverine D lead Michigan to the Rose Bowl.”

Perry. Tough, brave, tortured both physically and emotionally. Every night she dreamed of his last moments on Earth — those final few seconds before she’d killed him.

Those three men had died on her watch. So had Anthony Gitsham, Marcus Thompson, Officer Carmen Sanchez and a dozen other people she’d met, along with an entire city of people she had not.

“You can’t know what it’s like,” Margaret said.

He rolled his eyes. “You going to tell me again how you killed a million people? You didn’t kill them, Margaret.”

She felt the scream tear at her throat, felt her face screw into a nasty, lip-curling mask.

“I’m the one who told them to drop that bomb! I’m the one who made those people die! Me! But you wouldn’t know what that kind of responsibility is like because you’re just a G.o.dd.a.m.n grunt.”

This was the part of the dance where he’d say something like just a grunt? I’m not as smart as you, so I don’t matter? and then she would tell him he was exactly right, because that would hurt him and she wanted to hurt him. She didn’t have anyone else to lash out against.

His eyes narrowed to black slits. His skin gleamed brighter, because the arguments always made him sweat. He took in a nostril-flaring breath. There it was, the anger she wanted to see.

She waited for his usual response.

He didn’t deliver it.

The big, held breath slowly slid out of his lungs — not as a yell, but a sigh of defeat. And he didn’t even look angry anymore. He didn’t look hurt, either.

He looked … spent.

Clarence stared at the floor.

Margaret felt a pang of alarm; something was wrong, more wrong than normal — Clarence Otto always looked people in the eye, as if he was a lighthouse perpetually flas.h.i.+ng confidence, forever broadcasting a constant message of Alpha male.

Margaret felt hot. Her left hand pulled at the leg of her sweatpants: tug and release, tug and release, tug and release.

“Margo,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “I can’t do this anymore.”

Her hand speeded up: tug and release, tug and release, tug and release. He was going to say the words she constantly hoped he would say, the same words she never wanted to hear.

He cleared his throat, an oddly soft noise from a man of his size.

“Us,” he said, the single syllable loud, definitive. “I can’t do us anymore.”

She took a step back, a step so weak she almost fell. And still, he stared down.

This man, this tall, strong man who had served his country in one form or another for twenty years, this black man who had put up with anything he’d had to in order to climb the ranks of the white-run CIA, this lover who had once put her on the back of a motorcycle and raced her out of Detroit while the world went crazy around them — now this man could not look at her.

That tiny inaction said more than any words ever could. Clarence had already made up his mind. He had made the decision days ago, probably, and had been waiting for the right moment to tell her. Knowing him, he’d been waiting for a chance to be kind, to at least try to be kind, but she’d forced it out of him. She’d been a self-involved b.i.t.c.h and backed him into a corner.

“Honey …” she said. There was more to the sentence, but she lost it. The single word hung in the air, lonely and impotent.

She thought of their early years together, their happiest years, and how they’d squandered much of that with days and even weeks apart due to her marathon sessions in the lab or his other a.s.signments. She thought of how they’d console each other by saying they had all the time in the world to catch up, because they were married, because they were together.

Now it was all gone.

Clarence sniffed. He blinked back tears. “I’m getting older, Margo. I want a wife who’s here. I want a family.”

“I can’t,” she said instantly, feeling better for the briefest moment because this was another familiar argument. “I can’t bring a child into this world.”

A world of death and violence. A world of constant hatred. And she was too old, too old for a baby … those excuses and a hundred more.

Clarence sniffed again. He wiped the back of his hand against his eyes. “I know you can’t,” he said. “I accept that. Once I was willing to give up children if I could have you” — he looked up, spread his hands to indicate the room where she spent almost all her time — “but you’re not you anymore, Margo.”