The worst is the little boy I pass on my way to work every day. The first time I see him, I think he’s hanging out in the backyard, maybe playing with the trucks I see stacked up around him. It’s cold outside, but he’s bundled up pretty warm. Hat, scarf, gloves, boots. It’s more than what I have, anyway. I wave when I pass by the yard, and he looks at me but doesn’t wave back.
The next day, he’s there again. Same place. I’d think he hadn’t moved at all, but that’s silly, because he had to have gone inside overnight, right? But on the third day, as time is spinning slowly closer to the day when I can pick up my mom and bring her home, I stop and look over the fence at him.
“Hi,” I say.
He’s smaller than Opal. Maybe six, or small for an eight-year-old. His nose and cheeks are red. He’s still staring, but he doesn’t react when I speak.
“Hi, what’s your name?” I don’t know why I’m asking. Why I care. I shouldn’t blame him for not answering; after all, I’m a stranger and any kid these days should know better than to talk to strangers. Even ones like me, who are hopefully not so creepy.
He gets up then. His first step kicks a truck out of the way like he doesn’t even notice. I hear the scrape of chain on concrete. The kid’s moving faster now, heading for the fence at not quite a run.
He doesn’t make it even halfway before he’s jerked off his feet. Flat onto his back. He sprawls, arms and legs out like he’s trying to make a snow angel, though so far, the winter’s been bitterly cold and snowless. The chain is stretched out behind him, attached to a ring set into the concrete.
Horrified, I gasp and cover my mouth with my cold fingers. Before I can say anything, the back door opens and a woman comes out, with a baby on her hip. She’s barely dressed, wearing only a pair of sagging pajama bottoms and an oversized T-shirt. Slippers. The baby starts to scream and, no wonder, brought out into the frigid air wearing only a diaper. I’d scream, too.
“Oh, God, Tyler. Get up. Get up, get up, get up,” she chants, leaning over the boy on the ground. “Please, get up.”
Her head whips around to stare at me. “What are you looking at? What did you do to him? Don’t you know any better?”
“I’m sorry—”
She ignores me. The little boy on the ground, Tyler, sits up slowly. He doesn’t look at his mom. He doesn’t look at me. He crawls on hands and knees back to the pile of frozen sand and his trucks, where he sits and stares at nothing.
His mother has snot running out of her nose, and it looks frozen, too. “It’s the only place he’s quiet! It’s the only place he’ll stay quiet!”
I hold up my hands and back away from the fence. I’m not judging her. She puts her hand over the baby’s face, kissing its head, and, watching me warily, ducks back into the house. I can see her through the glass even after she closes the door. She’s watching me, making sure I go away.
So I do.
“Okay, hon, I have to go over some paperwork with you first. And you’ll have to watch a training video, okay?” Jean’s as nice as ever. She smiles at me, and I know I should be smiling back but I can only manage a grimace. “Don’t you worry about anything. It’s real easy to take care of her. The new collars are wonderful, just wonderful. Really.”
“Really?” I shouldn’t be sarcastic. Fortunately, she doesn’t notice, or if she does, she’s too nice to show it.
Jean pats my shoulder. “Really.” She takes me to a small room with a flickering TV, which plays a DVD showing me how to take care of my mom. The narrator’s careful to refer to the Connies as patients and I realize this movie was made for hospitals, not civilians, to use.
At any rate, the movie shows me how my mom’s been fitted with a surgically implanted pair of electrodes, connected wirelessly to the collar she’ll always have to wear. The collar takes a dual battery-pack system that has to be recharged at regular intervals. Two batteries guarantees that one will always be working while the other recharges, or in case it needs to be replaced. There’s no information on how long the batteries last or how much they cost to replace. But you do get the charger included, “for free.”
The movie demonstrates with diagrams and close-ups of someone’s hand on how to replace the batteries. The explanation is painfully slow, and I’m sort of afraid to think what sorts of doctors and nurses were so stupid, they weren’t considered smart enough to get this. I’m only seventeen and I figured it out before they even got halfway through the explanation.
The narrator is something else, too. Perky, bubbly, entirely annoying. “Bathing the patient can be accomplished through the use of sponge baths or limited showering. Though the StayCalm collar is waterproof and water-resistant up to four feet, it’s not recommended it be submerged.”
Another diagram. I wonder if the collar will simply stop working underwater, no longer sending its electrical pulses to the parts of the brain they want to damage on purpose to counteract the ones ruined by the disease. The next diagram shows me what happens instead.
“If the collar is submerged in water for more than seven minutes, the unit will be sent into Mercy Mode.”
The diagram shows a Connie underwater with X’s for eyes and lightning bolts shooting out from the collar.
“Likewise,” the narrator says in soothing tones, “Mercy Mode will also be triggered if the collar is removed by anyone other than a licensed technician, if the battery power fails for longer than seven minutes, or if the unit is triggered to fire more than thirty-two times in a twenty-minute time span. Mercy Mode is announced by a single beep from the unit, followed by color-coded lights. Steady green means the unit is functioning appropriately. Flashing green indicates extraneous activity. Yellow indicates unexpected surging, while flashing red indicates the introduction of Mercy Mode.”
The movie demonstrates with a collar not attached to a human, just held in someone’s hand. The narrator’s voice turns from calm to menacing.
“Constant red indicates Mercy Mode has been fully activated.”
I press pause on the remote and go to the door. “Jean?”
“Yes?” She looks up from her desk. She’s put on reading glasses, and the light’s reflected on them so I can’t really see her eyes.
“Can you explain something to me?”
“Sure.” She gets up, comes over.
“Mercy Mode?”
Jean slips off her glasses as her face falls. She looks over her shoulder and then closes the door to the closet where she was showing me the training movie. “You won’t have to worry about it, hon. Your mom’s a good one. She’ll be fine.”
“What do you mean, a good one?”
“I mean she hasn’t given us any trouble, even before she was fitted with her collar. Well, not any more than I’d have expected. She’s a good one. It means she won’t need Mercy Mode.”
“Mercy Mode… kills them?”
Something ripples over her face. “Yes.”
I grip the back of a chair. “Oh, God.”
“It’s the only way we’re allowed to release them. You know what they’ve done, most of them. I mean, not the ones in here. At least not anything anyone knows of.” Jean gives me a serious look. “You know the ones they find that’ve done… things… don’t even get released to the kennels. Mercy Mode’s a way of assuring everyone that when you take your loved one home, they won’t be able to harm themselves, or you. Or anyone else.”