Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

One evening, I woke up to the ten-minute curfew siren, and Sandy was standing on my chest with her pug face dripping spit on my neck. Her black lips curl back to show every tooth down to the yellow root. Her breathing feels hot on my face, and the same way she jumps to fetch a tennis ball, I watch Sandy crouch, ready to lunge at my throat. The minute she springs, I throw the sheets and blankets over her, and I bundle her up so she can't get out. Sandy's never weighed more than a sixteen-pound bowling ball, so I pick her up in that sack of blankets, only she's gone all werewolf, snarling and clawing inside, and my blankets are so old they're nothing but lint. One of her little pug paws, it claws through so I can see her black toenails. The blankets are wet with her drool, so it's like holding a little wolverine inside a bag of wet tissue paper. One more claw and she'll be out and biting me. Just to stun her, maybe knock her out, I swing the bundle so it hits the wall. Sandy's still snarling and thrashing inside, so I swing the bundle against the wall a second time. She keeps fighting, so I keeping hitting her against the wall, until my neighbor on the other side is pounding back. The one-minute curfew siren goes off, then the curfew bell. The wall, where I'm hitting the bundle of blankets, that spot is smeared with red. The bundle, where it's been hitting, the blankets are soaked through with red. Dripping red. My neighbor's still pounding and yelling for me to shut up, but Sandy's not moving or making any noise. It's nothing like in Old Yeller.

Talk about panicking. Now you can see what a thoughtless, bullshit idiot I am.

Neddy Nelson: Can you shrug off the fact that, before the rabies outbreak, the relatively younger Nighttimer community was about to outnumber the population of the Daytimers? Wouldn't a good epidemic do to Nighttimers what AIDS did in Africa? Wouldn't it devastate the political power of a rising community and preserve the existing power structures?

Galton Nye: We don't know if she's infected or not, but we're not taking our chances. We have our own health to worry about. I'm not saying her mother and I don't still love her, but the night she walked out with that so-called boyfriend of hers, our daughter was dead to us.

God bless her, but if our little girl shows up here some night, our door's staying locked.

34–What If

Neddy Nelson (Party Crasher): I want to ask, you ever wonder why the dominant culture says certain stuff? I mean, really hammers on you that some stuff is absolutely, deadly impossible? For instance, what science calls the "Grandfather Paradox"? How it works out that you should never, ever even consider time travel, because you might go back in time and kill your own grandfather by accident, let's say, and then—kah-poof—you'd not exist? I mean, if you trusted in the government experts, wouldn't you be careful and never go back in time?

Echo Lawrence (Party Crasher): I was so little, but I remember the I-SEE-U Act shutting down the rubberneck studies—those government engineers, like my mother, crashing into each other to study the effect on traffic. I remember my mother saying who was missing from her office, and I thought she meant fired or laid off. A few more engineers each week. I asked if she'd be leaving, and she told me no. Never, she said, not without her little Echo, meaning me, and my father. She said she'd never leave us behind.

Neddy Nelson: What if this? If somebody went back and reworked the past, how would the rest of us know? Don't we only know the present reality that we know? What if reality gets reshuffled—in little, tiny ways—all the time? Or what if the people in power have already shuffled the past to get on top, and now they're telling the rest of us not to monkey around with history or we'll go back and kill our ancient ancestors and every generation after that, and then we'll never get born?

I mean, could the people who control all the money and politics ever invent a scarier warning? Didn't these same science experts used to say the earth was flat? Wasn't it really important we should stay at home and be peasants and slaves or we'd fall off the edge?

Echo Lawrence: As a little kid, I remember going to a fucking lot of funerals, mostly for people who worked with my mother. Sitting in church, my father would elbow her, saying, "This is where they really go…"

And my mother, behind her black veil, would tell him, "Not all of them…"

Behind their bedroom door, they'd argue about moving, leaving, taking off. My mother called it Reverse Pioneering, to some place where the air was clean and we'd have empty land all around us. It was a nice dream, but even to a little kid she sounded crazy. At this point in history, there was no place in the polluted, crowded world left like that.