Contaminated 2: Mercy Mode (6 page)

“We should find out if she has any sisters.”

Opal beams up at me. “Oh, do you think she does?”

I’m not sure, but I hope so.

I HAVE NO IDEA HOW FAR A CHICKEN CAN
wander, but it can’t be that far. Can it? I have no idea how to judge anything about a chicken’s health any more than I know about its roaming range, but Bokky is fat and bright eyed and not skittish, so that makes me think she must’ve been taken care of pretty well, at least until recently. There are plenty of farms around, but I’m willing to bet this chicken came from someplace closer.

Opal and I take our bikes. The streets are pitted and buckled, and the tenacious raspberry bushes have started encroaching on the asphalt. My foot still hurts this morning, even after I soaked it and tried to pull out all the tiny splinters, but with an adhesive bandage and an extra-thick pair of socks, it’s feeling better.

At the bottom of our driveway, we pause. Opal’s grown so much taller that her bike, with its white-and-pink tassels hanging from the handlebars, is too small for her. The
hems of her jeans hit her a few inches above her ankles, something I notice just now. Her pants are too short, but her hair’s too long.

“Take a picture; it’ll last longer,” Opal says smartly, and if it wouldn’t be weird and also sort of gross, since she hasn’t taken a bath in days, I’d hug her.

“Which direction?” To the left is a big hill we’ll have to push our bikes up, but will be easier to coast down at the end, when we might be tired. To the right, the road goes down, which will be great to start, but much harder on the return trip.

Opal doesn’t think about that. She jerks a thumb to the right. “Down.”

“Up,” I tell her. “That’s toward the back of the neighborhood, and don’t you think if anyone was keeping chickens toward the front gate, I’d have noticed when I passed?”

“Do you notice everything?” Opal can be a bit of a brat, and she’s too smart for her own good, but she has a point.

“Of course not. But I’d probably notice if someone’s living in any of those houses, and I haven’t seen any signs of it.”

“Maybe they’re hiding.” Opal shrugs and pushes her bike along with her feet, not pedaling. She heads left, though, so at least we don’t have to argue about it.

“Maybe.”

“
We
do,” she points out.

We don’t hide, exactly. Not really. It’s more like we lay low. The generator makes enough noise to attract attention, as do the lights we use for a few hours at night. The police come through every so often, scouting for trouble, but they know who we are and they leave us alone, even though Spring Lake Commons was evacuated, and technically, we aren’t supposed to be living here. The soldiers are the ones we have to watch out for, because they’re mostly young, with lots of time and not a whole lot to do except ride around looking for reasons to make people miserable.

“I bet it’s the lady with all the pets.” I point ahead to the rising road. The house I mean is just beyond the old bus stop where once I’d waited with my backpack and books and my friends in a life I’d been stupid to think was lame. “Remember her?”

“She was mean.” Opal frowns as she puts her feet on the pedals and starts up the hill.

I haven’t been down this part of the street since before the Contamination, but I’m clearly in much better shape than I was back then, because the hill that used to make me huff and puff is easy to ride up now. Even for Opal, and I was sure she’d complain about it. At the top, I look back toward our driveway. I feel a little bad about leaving Mom and Mrs. Holly alone in a way I don’t when Opal’s there. Dumb, I know, since she’s a kid and they’re adults,
but … Mom isn’t herself and Mrs. Holly is old and not as “spry,” as she calls it.

“Come on, Velvet!” Opal’s impatient. She waves a hand toward the long, curving street lined with trees and driveways.

This part of the street is flat enough that we can see almost the whole length to where it makes a T at the back end of the neighborhood. And I stop, grabbing at Opal’s shirt to keep her from pedaling away from me. There are two cars in the middle of the street, about half a mile from us. Two wrecked cars.

The pet lady’s house is only two driveways ahead of us, with still half the distance beyond that before we’d even get close enough to see anything inside those cars, but they
are
between us and the next intersection. Still, I gesture at Opal to hush. I don’t know why. Just that the sight of those cars makes my stomach churn.

Opal puts a hand on her cocked hip and gives me an exasperated look. “Chickens? Hello?”

“Right.” I push off on my bike, heading for the driveway of the house all the neighborhood kids had been fascinated by, even as they’d learned to stay clear.

The pet lady had loved animals. Kids, not so much. The school even had to move the official bus stop because of how many times she complained about kids standing on the edge of her property while waiting for the bus. Not that any of us ever so much as put a toe on her lawn, because she’d
come hurtling out the front door, yelling at anyone who did. We never stopped there during magazine sales fundraising time, nor for Girl Scout cookies, nor for Christmas caroling, nor for trick-or-treating. Rumor had it that she owned a potbellied pig she kept in the fenced backyard, and although that exotic pet seemed worth at least a peek, nobody had been brave enough to try it.

“She has a pit bull trained to bite you in the butt,” Opal says solemnly as we pause at the foot of the drive.

“Mom said that’s not true.”

She gives me a dark look. “Peter Miller said he saw it once.”

“Peter Miller never saw anything,” I tell her, hoping that was true.

Closer to the house, we both hesitate again. The yard’s overgrown with the same weeds and brush as ours, but there’s something about this house that feels empty. I listen for the sound of a growling pit bull or anything else, but there’s nothing but the rustle of leaves and the far-off chirping of birds.

I ring the bell, anyway. We wait for a minute or so. Opal presses her ear to the door, listening. She rings the bell again and again before I can stop her.

“Nobody’s home,” she says confidently, and twists the door handle.

“Wait! You can’t just …”

But she can just, can’t she? Nobody’s lived in this house
for a long time. Probably years. Inside the foyer, a small table is overturned, and dead leaves skitter across the tiles in front of our cautious feet, but coats still hang from the rack and none of the glass looks broken. You’d think I’d have lost the habit of reaching for the light switch, but I do it, anyway. The lights don’t turn on, but the big overhead windows let in enough sunshine so that we really don’t need anything extra.

Opal makes a face. “It stinks in here.”

It does. Bad. Like cat pee and dog fur and poop, but really old. Mostly it just smells like damp and mold. I rub the sleeves of my sweatshirt.

“C’mon, let’s go out back. She wouldn’t keep chickens in the house.” I move toward what I hope is the kitchen, and Opal follows.

It’s creepy, stalking through a stranger’s house, even if we’re sure she’s not home and hasn’t been for probably at least two years. We pass a living room, shadowy and dark, the curtains drawn. The carpet looks thick and soft, but the smell coming from that room is worse than by the front door, and when I peek inside, I see that something has made a mess of the overstuffed couch, which used to be covered by what looks like a sheet. Something big enough to tear the cushions apart and scatter the stuffing.

“Pit bull,” Opal says darkly, inching closer to me. She actually takes my hand.

I can’t stop myself from cringing a little when we pass
the open staircase and bridge hallway above. Something could be lurking up there, waiting to jump down on us.… I push Opal along faster as I crane my neck to keep an eye overhead. I imagine the glint of eyes watching us, or maybe it’s not imagination. Either way, we hustle through an arched doorway into a bright kitchen that would be cheery if it didn’t reek like a zoo. The lower cupboards have been clawed to splinters. Muddy paw prints paint all the countertops. The fridge hangs open, the shelves and drawers covered in the remains of food spoiled so long ago that they, at least, don’t stink.

Opal covers her mouth and nose. “Yuck.”

“She definitely had pets. Wow.” I look around. There are six or seven food and water bowls, all empty and overturned, scattered around the tile floor. A couple of big plastic bins that must’ve once held pet food are on their sides, punctured and clawed.

Opal studies them, crouching, then looks at me with a frown. “I bet they left and didn’t take their pets along. And they got hungry.”

We’re both silent at that, thinking of our old dog, Jody. You could hardly leave her for a few hours without having to worry she’d get into the garbage or something else. She liked to dig into my mom’s dirty laundry and eat my dad’s socks, too. She’d been long dead by the time Opal and I had to leave our house to be placed in the government-assisted housing we’d been in while I looked for our mom. But
when I think of leaving Jody behind, starving so that she had to claw her way into the cupboards just to find something to eat …

“I thought she loved them.” Opal sounds bewildered and sad, like she might start to cry.

I know how she feels. “Just because someone has a lot of something doesn’t mean they love it. Some people like to collect stuff.”

“Even animals?” She sounds horrified and disgusted.

“Yeah. I guess. I heard Dad say to Mom once that the pet lady was an animal hoarder.”

Opal pokes one of the bins with her toe. Behind her is a set of sliding glass doors inset with a pet door big enough to let a pit bull in and out. Hell, big enough to let Opal in and out. The rubber flap is ragged and splashed with mud.

“Maybe they got out and ran away when they couldn’t get any more food,” she says.

Still, I’m sad enough to cry a little myself when I think of how scared and hungry the dogs—more than one, by the looks of it—must’ve been. Cats, too. Even that poor pig. I don’t remember what they told people to do with their animals when we were all evacuated from the neighborhood, but I’m sure the pet lady thought she’d come back.

I don’t want to think about why she never did.

We find the pig outside. At least what’s left of it. There’s no way to tell how it died, just that its skeleton is mostly all
in one place, close to a small doghouse off the deck. The only way we can tell it was a pig is by the hoofs.

Opal is silent for a minute or so, then begins to snuffle. “Peter Miller said the pig’s name was Wilbur.”

“Of course it was.” I pat her on the shoulder.

“And those”—she points at the feet—“are called trotters.”

I have no idea if that’s true, but I turn her gently away from the sight of the pig’s remains. The rest of the yard has been dug up so much, it’s more holes than grass, but it might’ve always been that way. We look for chickens, but the yard is empty. Not even a coop to show that once the pet lady might’ve had some.

“Maybe Bokky was the only one she had,” Opal says.

“Maybe.” But the chicken looked too fat and healthy to have been scratching out an existence on her own—that’s what I think. “C’mon. Let’s ride a little farther. We might find something.”

It’s a relief to get out of that stinky house and into the fresh air. The bright sun overhead feels good after the shadows inside. Opal and I get on our bikes and push off on the cracked asphalt, pedaling for a few feet before she stops.

She’s looking at the two cars ahead of us. “Velvet, I don’t wanna go past there.”

“It’s a wreck, that’s all. Someone was going too fast, I guess. It’s fine. We have to go past them,” I tell her, “in
order to get to the next houses. And, hey—remember the pond?”

Opal gives me a narrow-eyed look. “Yes.”

“We can check it out. See the fish. We haven’t done that in a long time.”

We don’t live in a traditional neighborhood with manicured, postage-stamp lawns. Most of the houses have several acres of land, all wooded. The house I’m thinking about is set on what my dad said was one of the biggest plots in the neighborhood. The original owners had dammed up and diverted a few of the springs and streams running across their property to make a couple of ponds big enough to hold fish and frogs. Giant, beautiful koi with flowing tails and bulging eyes. We were all fascinated by the ponds and the tadpoles in them every spring. Sometimes after dinner, my mom and dad would give us each a plastic baggy full of stale bread crumbs and we’d all walk up there. My parents would chat with the people who lived there while we fed the fish and splashed our toes in the edge of the water.

“It’ll be fun,” I say.

Opal perks up at that, though she gives the cars a wary glare. “They’re creepy.”

They
are
creepy; I have to agree with her about that. “We’ll ride fast.”

And we try, but I can’t stop myself from looking in as I ride past. I slow without wanting to, letting Opal go ahead.

The glare from the sun makes it hard to see inside the window, which is starred and cracked from the impact of someone’s head.

There’s a person in the car closest to me.

Long dead, slumped over the steering wheel, face turned away so I can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman. I lose my balance, a pedal catching the back of my leg and cutting into my skin. Muttering a curse, I hop, my bike wobbling. I keep myself from falling only at the last second by grabbing the car’s door handle. The metal’s hot enough to sting my palm, and still off balance, I slap my hand flat against the glass of the passenger-side door.

For a long, terrible moment, I’m convinced that dead face is going to turn and give me a gape-jawed grin, lunge toward me. Try to eat my nose off, slurp out my eyes …

“Velvet!” Opal cries, sounding affronted and horrified. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing. Keep going. I’m just looking.”

“At what?”

“Nothing,” I tell her, and push off with one foot, urging my bike to go.

It is nothing. I should care more, but the person in the car’s been dead for a long time. Long enough to have turned mostly to bone and dried, rubbery flesh. I’m not going to pull him out and bury him, and he can’t do anything to hurt us, so why not leave him alone?