Authors: Sarah Langan
“I know how your dad works. It would have blown over. What Lou did to himself is on him, not you.”
“It’s my fault, too,” Danny said.
Tim shook his head. “Some people got no sense. They’re like those starfish that turn inside out, just to scare off predators. It hurts them every time, and in the end they still get eaten. Their instincts are all wrong, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. What you need is to find a place to hide, and stay there.” Then he picked up his coffee and headed out of the cafeteria.
After that, Danny started walking. He could feel something coming like an electrical storm about to blow. This hospital wasn’t safe. There were too many sick people inside it. If this trouble with James had started because he’d gotten infected, then a lot more trouble was on its way.
He followed the yellow line, which got him thinking about the yellow brick road, which got him thinking about teaching James to make wintergreen Life Savers sparkle in the dark. Even then, with the lights out, a part of him had been scared of that kid.
The tape went from yellow to blue, blue to green, green to red. The people working tonight didn’t look fit for duty; most were coughing, and the rest were so tired they could hardly stand.
He saw a sign that said, “St. Lucy’s Chapel” and peered inside. Relatives of the sick clogged the aisles. Some held rosaries. Some coughed. A lot just cried. They were packed tightly in their pews, and painted all over the murals along the walls were renderings of shep- herds with their sheep.
Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.
This hospital was full of infected, and the food in the cafeteria was gone. He thought about the rabbits James had eaten, and the bones he’d seen on lawns all over Corpus Christi this morning. An idea occurred to him, but he didn’t want to think about it just yet, so instead he thought about a nursery rhyme his mother had taught him during better days.
A kid’ll eat ivy too wouldn’t you?
He left the chapel and kept walking. Red to black. He was thinking about his mom’s beguiling smile, like any- one she shone it on was the most important person in the world. Maybe he’d imagined the shock on her face in the dining room, like at the last minute she’d known
what her younger son had become, and it had broken her heart.
But James had done something even worse. As Danny had fled for the police station, he’d spied a body im- paled on the spiked cast-iron fence surrounding his house. Its legs had swung a little in the wind, and for a second Danny had thought it was still alive.
Before seeing that thing on the fence, he’d still hoped that there was something in James worth saving. Sure, they hated each other, but he’d always believed that when the shit storm flew, they had each other’s backs. In that moment he understood that James was a mon- ster. Impaled on the spike was Miller Walker’s lifeless body.
Off one of the rooms in the red-taped hallway, he heard a low-pitched scream. The sound was cut short, and then nothing. He turned and started back. Time to go, he knew, but he forgot why (
They’re hungry, re- member? Get out of here, Danny, while you still can!
). He walked backward—red to green. The patients off the green tape in ICU weren’t coughing anymore, but plenty were squirming out of bed. Some looked strong, but the rest were slow. Their legs were too long, and their backs too short, so they couldn’t walk, but they couldn’t crawl, either. It was like the virus inside them didn’t fit quite right. He blinked and decided to pretend that a part of him was home watching
Elimidate
. A part of him was safe.
He pressed himself against the light blue wall as he walked, trying to make himself small. They were in their rooms still, and none had gotten into the hall. Maybe they wouldn’t see him. Maybe they wouldn’t do the thing that James had done.
Murder!
It was quiet all of a sudden, like the electricity storm he’d felt coming had finally struck. The halls were empty of people now, and only the sick in their beds were left. No one was complaining about their dead friend, par- ent, or cat. No one was praying, or even coughing. The nurses, doctors, and even the orderlies were gone.
Where did they go?
a little voice inside him asked. He thought he knew the answer, and it was terrible. Something flopped on the floor behind him and he turned. It was child-sized, and not moving fast enough to catch him. It took him a while before he realized that it used to be human. A baby. Its eyes were black.
He stumbled as he ran.
Green to blue. Blue opened up to the large room where he’d started. Admitting. A few feet ahead was the exit, and behind the counter was a doctor in pink scrubs whose name tag read “ROSSOFF” in black, block letters. He held up his hands, the universal sign of surrender, which was how Danny knew he was still human. His lips moved, and he mouthed what looked like
mercy
.
The emergency room gurneys were all empty, and surrounding Rossoff were the patients who’d recently been sleeping. Danny watched, even though he knew he should run through the automatic doors ahead of him. Something was stuck inside them, so they opened and closed, again and again. But loneliness is a terrible thing. He didn’t want this man’s last moments to hap- pen without a witness. Or maybe it was Danny who was lonely.
A fat girl, he knew her—Alice Schiffer—took the doctor’s hand like she was going to lead him away and save him from the crowd. The doctor let her hold his palm, and Danny could see the relief on his face like
someone had splashed him with cold water, and he was suddenly less numb, and a lot closer to breaking down. Danny felt relief, too.
Thank you, God,
he thought. But then Alice lunged. “Wha—?” the doctor shouted. His arms and legs were skinny, but he had a big gut, which made Danny wonder if he’d always shown deference to fat people because they reminded him of his dad. Ros- soff jerked his bleeding hand from her mouth. Her lips were red. The others closed in, until Rossoff wasn’t standing anymore. Danny couldn’t see him; he could only hear the man’s screams.
His throat hurt, and he realized it wasn’t the doctor screaming, it was he.
At the sound, several of the infected scurried to- ward him. They crawled, slithered, and even walked. Muscles twitched under their pale, paper-thin skin. They were coats, he decided. White lab coats and blue gowns like pictures from a book. He avoided looking into their black eyes, but he still recognized Aran Schiffer, the orderlies he’d so recently begged for help, and his first kiss Frannie Saulnier, who’d probably been the nicest girl he’d ever dated, which was why he’d dumped her. He’d wanted her to meet somebody better.
Frannie took the first step. “Danny, I’ve been waiting a long time,” she said. She’d been a wet-eyed, emotional kind of girl, who touched her heart when she saw peo- ple she loved, like they didn’t just live in the world, they lived inside her, too. She touched her heart now, but in her voice, there was no emotion at all.
He ran out the doors, and into the night. They fol- lowed him to his mom’s Mercedes. Once he got into the car he locked the doors, and then—wham!—he was up on two wheels. He stomach flipped like he was on a
Ferris wheel that breaks free of its base, and he slammed hard into the driver side door. Then the car fell, and he bounced once, twice, and was level again.
What was happening? He looked out and saw their shining black eyes. Five? Ten? Fifty? He couldn’t tell how many. The big one, Aran from the wrestling team, was trying to flip the car. The Mercedes was heavy—a German tank, practically, but still. Aran took a few steps back, and started to charge. This time he had re- inforcements. Two others were running with him. Danny reached into the glove compartment and pulled out the keys. He turned the ignition just as three of them slammed against the door. The car ricocheted, then went up on two wheels, and for a dangerous split second, almost flipped. Danny was pressed against the window. “Shit!” Danny screamed. “Shit! Get-me-out- get-me-out!”
He reached down and gunned the gas. The car jerked forward and slammed down. Tires groaned and bounced. He sideswiped somebody’s SUV, and thud-thud-thud, hit a few infected, too. “Out-out-out!” he yelled, just as the hysterical kid on the college radio shouted through the Mercedes speakers: “If this disease is out of Maine, this might be the end of the world!”
In the rearview mirrors, those shining eyes got farther away, and he counted backward from ten, so he didn’t ease up on the gas and start crying, while on the radio the kid from Colby announced, “Thanks, caller. An- other thing I don’t want to think about. Now, if anyone knows my mom on 16 Temple Street in Portland, could you stop by and check on her?”
Bump! The car lurched over something solid, and then dragged it from the chassis. A body? Whose body? Any body home? He giggled. The car slowed, even though he
was pushing the pedal to the floor. In the rearview mir- ror, those shining black eyes came closer. “Fuckers!” he cried.
“Her name’s Eunice Hilledebrandt and she’ll make you dinner if you drop by. Thanks, man. Thanks a lot. You’d be doing me a solid,” the kid on the radio said, like he’d forgotten this was a pandemic, and he was still trying to be cool.
“She’s dead, you moron,” Danny answered. “The second you stand still, you’re dead.” Then he pumped the gas, and flop-flop-flop! the thing on the chassis fi- nally broke free. He was cruising again, and the eyes got farther away.
The scenery went by, and he remembered that he was driving. It meant he was still alive, and he’d gotten out of the hospital. He hit a few things in the road. He hoped they weren’t his mother’s head. A mile later he pulled into his parents’ driveway. Where else could he go? The thing on the spike (
Never let them see you coming, Danny, boy!
) was gone, and he wondered who the hell had gone and stolen his old man. Then he wondered if he’d gone mad.
From far away, he could see the eyes following him.
Still, the eyes were watching.
He raced inside the house and looked for the thing he needed. He couldn’t think of its name, but he saw a picture of it in his mind. He found it in the hall closet, behind the squash and tennis rackets, under the skis and poles, the fly-fishing equipment, the golf clubs, the
Playboy
calendars in plastic shrink film like collector’s items. It was a heavy thing, stored in a shoebox. He put the bullets in his pocket but some spilled. They rolled, and the sound was too loud. It would wake the dead.
He opened the door to the basement and locked him- self inside. He held the gun pointed at the door for about an hour before he remembered to fill its cham- bers with bullets. Sometime later, he didn’t know how much—his cell phone wasn’t working right, and he didn’t have a watch—a window on the main floor shat- tered. Then something swished, and the wooden floor creaked.
The sound was slithering, and he imagined bodies pulling themselves across the floor. The sick ones, who didn’t move quite right. He followed their path along the ceiling with his eyes. They were in the hall, and then the kitchen, and then in the dining room. He gasped. They were with his mother. He should have buried her. Oh God, he should have laid her to rest.
After a while, it got quiet again. At first he was re- lieved, and then he wasn’t. It was dark in the cellar. He didn’t dare turn on the lights. He thought about his mother’s eyes. His dad’s eyes, too. In his mind he could see the outlines of their faces like photo negatives; pale and without emotion. Now that they were dead, they were changed. They were bad. They blamed him for what James had done.
He should have buried them better. Like the rabbits. He’d never done a decent thing in his whole life, and now the end of the world had come, and all his chances had run out.
His body felt bloated, like his organs were soaked with sorrow, and because of that they were expanding inside him. They were about to burst, and when they did he would die. “Mom and Dad, please stay dead. I don’t want to see you anymore,” he whispered into the darkness. In his mind, he could see their faces, so dis- appointed. They watched him all night.
And then, exhausted, he slept.
When he woke Sunday afternoon, he discovered that while a new day had begun, the nightmare persisted. He ate his tears, and imagined Felice and Miller’s hu- morless ghosts watching him in the dark, and, finally, he turned the gun on himself.
F
enstad didn’t go straight to his house after he left the hospital. Instead he parked at the top of the hill, and waited for his heart to stop pounding. Ex- cept for WBAI at Colby College, most of the local radio stations had switched to national satellites. These were broadcasting prerecorded sets or else an- nouncing press releases advising citizens across New England to lock their doors because help was on
its way.
Fenstad’s mind was a jumble of images. He tried not to let them affect him. As if he were visiting a shark tank at the aquarium, he tried to stay on the safe side of the glass. In his mind he saw Alice’s severed head, and he remembered his fifth-grade teacher’s running joke:
Heads will roll
! He saw the short woman’s mutilated daisy tat- too, and the chicken bone spinning against his shoe.
Better run, Fennie
. His lips were numb, and he won- dered if he might be having a heart attack until he re- membered the OxyContin. He felt his breast pocket, to reassure himself that more pills remained.
He got out of the car and looked down at the town. Plumes of dark smoke wafted up from the business district (fires? explosions?), but otherwise, all was still.
Houses were shuttered and doors were closed. He won- dered how many people, if any, were left. Nestled within the fertile green lawns were ivory specks: bones. A few feet away from him on the street was a picked-clean hu- man skull. Even its scalp was gone. But the town wasn’t completely abandoned. Tim Carroll’s cruiser was tool- ing through the streets. The man had definitely earned his pay.
The morning’s drizzling spits intensified, and the rain began to pour from the gray sky. For the first time since this had started, Fenstad had an appropriate emotion. He was terrified.