1 Minute to Midnight
Part 7: Morgan Returns
By Juliet Clare
The sun retreated behind the Appalachian mountains. A strip of bright orange made its way clear across the sky, broken only by the sharp edges of clouds. Morgan and Marisol had been chasing the light for several hours. Though neither one of them said it, both of them knew they were peering through shattered glass that offered only so much protection from the incoming storm.
Morgan watched as Marisol removed hand cream from her pocket, flicking back the cap, and pushing some of its contents into her palm. She massaged the cream into her hands. Marisol’s fingernails were unkempt; they were worn, scuffed, used, except in these rare silent moments, when she managed to care for them.
“My hands are getting destroyed by the sanitizer,” Marisol finally said. She held out the hand cream for Morgan.
“It’s not a suggestion…” Marisol said with a wry smile. Morgan took the hand cream from her.
CDC guidelines encouraged washing hands or using sanitizer after coming in contact with “high-touch” surfaces. This prevented potential contamination. These advisories were still internal, a caveat that gave Morgan pause. Out of fear of causing unnecessary alarm, the CDC had assigned a top-down request to employees to continue their research on infection rates and locations before releasing reports to the public. But the more they discovered, the more his sense of urgency grew, making silence seem irresponsible; even criminal.
“I think we should stop for the night,” Morgan suggested. The light was thinning; in these parts, once night fell, spines tensed and trigger fingers itched.
Marisol leaned forward towards the dashboard, and tapped a microphone on the navigation screen.
“Nearest motel,” Marisol said, her eyes looking around as if needing to make eye-contact with someone in order to fulfill the request. They eventually settled on Morgan’s. She gave him an exhausted smile. With that simple gesture, warmth flooded Morgan’s body; a knot twisted in the pit of his stomach. Sometimes it ached to think of pleasant things.
Morgan leaned his head against the headrest as the car automatically steered them in the direction of a motel. He closed his eyes, thinking back to the day he lost his mother. It’s strange how everything can feel so normal and then suddenly, in the blink of an eye, your entire world changes. There is only the before and the after.
In the waiting room of a nondescript office, Morgan’s skinny eight year old frame occupied a plastic chair. After Morgan had been cleared to leave, he waited for his mother. It had been hours since they had come in together, and adrenaline was no longer enough to keep him awake.
Morgan’s head slipped in his hand, yanking him out of the momentary relief of sleep. Standing across the room was a tall woman with dark skin different from his own. She was not from West Virginia, that much Morgan could tell.
As she walked towards Morgan, she said her name, but he couldn’t catch it. Her words came through too quickly for him to process, and with an accent he hadn’t heard before.
“What’s your name?” The woman asked. Her face was gentle, she had a deceptively kind manner, one that put Morgan on edge. He watched as she knelt down in front of him, her eyes level with his.
“I can’t help you unless you tell me your name,” she said. In the last 12 hours, Morgan’s only sense of safety and security had been ripped from him. It was becoming clear that he would not be reunited with his mother this evening.
“Morgan,” he said.
The woman in front of him nodded, and to his surprise, he noticed her eyes shimmer as tears began to form. Perhaps she simply had been looking at him for so long they were beginning to sting, or perhaps, as Morgan later understood with increasing clarity — associating a name with a crime somehow made it more concrete.
Their car turned into a gravel parking lot outside an old Motel 8. The fluorescent bulbs of the sign posted out front burned a sharp red inside their casing. The surrounding woods had begun to impose themselves upon the motel; a centuries long migration. In the adjacent parking lot was a bar. From afar, Morgan witnessed a man tumble out of the entrance and make an inebriated attempt to locate his car.
“Engine off,” Marisol commanded. The subtle buzz that ran through the sedan almost unnoticed eased to nothing. The doors unlocked automatically, liberating them.
As they stepped inside the lobby of the Motel 8, they were transported back to some indeterminable time in their nation’s history. One where families still journeyed cross country, stopping at night only to rest their heads before moving on to the next National Park, stomachs full of Fruit Loops and room-temperature milk.
The room was quiet with the exception of the receptionist, who spoke in hushed tones into the receiver of the motel’s phone. Her lips were practically touching it, as she clutched the phone between shoulder and cheek. Her eyes darted in Morgan’s direction as he neared the desk, her lips moving faster trying to convey as much information as necessary before the imminent interruption.
It always fascinated Morgan, the speed with which portions of this country moved, while others were frozen, waiting for someone to pull them forward into the 21st century. The phone reminded him of the one the doctor picked up, almost thirty years earlier, upon learning his name.
She looked at him in the same way the receptionist did, keeping a watchful eye, while attempting to discreetly speak with someone on the other line. The woman, who by now Morgan knew only as “the doctor”, had asked for his father’s name. Morgan’s father had passed several years after he was born. His mother rarely spoke of him; he had become less a memory than a face in a photograph hidden beneath folded clothes in his mother’s drawer.
“Do you have family nearby?”
Morgan shook his head. The only family he had was unceremoniously wheeled away from him earlier that day.
“Come on,” Marisol tugged at Morgan’s jacket, bringing him back to the motel lobby.
“I’ve got the keys,” she added as he followed her out to the long strip of concrete leading up to about a dozen or so doors. They moved along together, the sound of crickets blaring in the background interrupted only occasionally by a bullfrog’s throaty cry. Marisol held up two keys.
“On paper we got two,” she said, before returning one of the keys to her pocket. Morgan wondered about the dangers of loving someone so much.
“When I was a kid it was never like this,” Morgan said.
“How do you mean?”
“The veiled looks, the hushed calls,” Morgan paused. “I’m a stranger around here… how it was when I was little and now. It’s completely different…” Morgan added as he shook his head, tossing aside the memory of a faded world.
“Divisions and distrust. Between God and Country, one has betrayed its people so overtly that the only answer is to turn to the other,” Marisol concluded, her eyes drifting to the parking lot across the way.
The man Morgan had noticed earlier was leaning up against a car, legs folded, barely able to hold himself up; his jaw was slack, mouth agape. The gasping of his voice traveled through the air as the cry of a dying animal. Marisol stepped forward, her fine hearing picking up the subtleties in the man’s breathing; the sibilant whimper.
Marisol bolted forward, and Morgan followed, keenly aware of the instincts she possessed. The gravel crunched beneath their feet, a relentless beat that encouraged them to move faster.
The man’s neck was contorted, tilted back in such a way that his pupils were still visible through drooping eyelids. Along his neck, a sore broke through running clear up to the bottom of his chin. Morgan and Marisol stopped in their tracks, watching as the man wheezed, his lips cracked and broken. The noise around them seemed to dim, they looked to one another, fear and apprehension settling heavily on their faces.
