Blood Music (12 page)

BROOKLYN HEIGHTS

Mother? Howard?” Suzy McKenzie wrapped herself in the sky-blue flannel robe her boyfriend had given her the month before in celebration of her eighteenth birthday, and padded barefoot down the hall. Her eyes were bleary with sleep. “Ken?” She was usually the last to wake up. “Slow Suzy” she often called herself with a secret, knowing smile.

She didn’t keep clocks in her room but the sun outside the window was high enough for it to be past ten o’clock. The bedroom doors were closed. “Mother?” She knocked on the door of her mother’s room. No answer.

Surely one of her brothers would be up. “Kenneth? Howard?” She turned around in the middle of the hall, making the wood floor creak. Then she twisted the knob on her mother’s door and pushed it open. “Mother?” The bed had not been made; the covers slumped around the bottom. Everybody must be downstairs. She washed her face in the bathroom, inspected the akin of her cheeks for more blemishes, was relieved to find none, and walked down the stairs into the foyer. She couldn’t hear a sound.

“Hey,” she called out from the living room, confused and unhappy. “Nobody woke me up. I’ll be late for work.” She was in her third week of waitressing at a neighborhood deli. She enjoyed the work it was much more interesting and real than working at the Salvation Army thrift store—and it helped her mother financially. Her mother had lost her job three months before and lived on the irregular checks from Suzy’s father, plus their rapidly diminishing savings. She looked at the Benrus ship’s dock on the table and shook her head. Ten thirty; she was really late. But that didn’t worry her as much as where everybody had gone. They fought a lot, sure, but they were a close family except for her father, whom she hardly missed any more, not much anyway—and everybody wouldn’t just go away and not tell her, not even wake her up.

She pushed the swinging door to the kitchen and stepped halfway through. What she saw didn’t register at first: three shapes out of place, three bodies, one in a dress on the floor, slumped up against the sink, one in jeans with no shut in a chair at the kitchen table, the third half-in, half-out of the pantry. No muss, no fuss, just three bodies she couldn’t immediately recognize.

She was quite calm at first She wished she hadn’t opened the door just then; perhaps if she had opened it a few moments earlier, or later, everything would have been normal. Somehow it would have been a different door-the door to her world—and life would have gone on with just the minor lapse of no one awakening her. Instead, she hadn’t been warned, and that wasn’t fair, really. She had opened the door at just the wrong rime, and it was too late to close it.

The body against the sink wore her mother’s dress. The face, arms, legs, and hands were covered with raised white stripes. Suzy entered the kitchen two small steps, her breath coming short and uneven. The door slipped out of her fingers and swung shut. She took a step back, then one sideways, a small dance of terror and indecision. She would have to call the police, of course. Maybe an ambulance. But first she would have to find out what happened and all her instincts told her just to get out of the kitchen, out of the house.

Howard, twenty, regularly wore jeans without a shirt around the house. He liked to go bare-chested to show off his well-muscled, if not brawny frame. Now his chest was a reddish brown color, like an Indian’s, and ridged like a potato chip or an old-fashioned washboard. His face was calm, eyes closed, mouth shut He was still breathing.

Kenneth—it had to be Kenneth—looked more like a pile of dough in clothes than her eldest brother.

Whatever had happened was completely incomprehensible. She wondered if it was something everybody else knew about but had forgotten to tell her.

No, that didn’t make sense. People were seldom cruel to her, and her mother and brothers were never cruel. The best thing to do was back out the door and call the police, or somebody; somebody who would know what to do.

She looked at the list of numbers pinned above the old black phone in the foyer, then tried to dial the emergency number. She kept fumbling, her finger jerking from the holes in the dial. Tears were in her eyes when she finally managed to complete the three digits.

The phone rang for several minutes without answer. Finally a recording came on: “All our lines are busy. Please do not hang up or you will lose your priority.” Then more ringing. After another five minutes, she hung up, sobbing, and dialed for the operator. No answer there, either. Then she thought of the conversation they had had the night before, about some sort of bug in California. It had been on the radio. Everybody getting sick and troops being called in. Only then, remembering this, did Suzy McKenzie go out the front door and stand on the steps, screaming for help.

The street was deserted. Parked cars lined both sides—inexplicably—for parking was forbidden between eight in the morning and six at night every day but Thursday and Friday, and this was Tuesday, and the enforcement was strict. Nobody was driving. She couldn’t see anybody in a car or walking or sitting in a window. She ran up one side of the street, weeping and shouting first in supplication, then in anger, then terror, then again begging for help.

She stopped screaming when she saw a postman lying on the front walk of a brownstone between two parallel wrought-iron fences. He lay on his back, eyes shut, and he looked just like Mother and Howard. To Suzy, postmen were sacred beings, always reliable. She used her fingers to push the terror out of her face and scrunched her eyes shut in concentration. “That bug’s gotten everywhere,” she told herself. “Somebody has to know what to do.”

She returned to her house and picked up the phone again. She began dialing all the numbers she knew. Some went through; others created only silence or strange computer noises. None of the phones that rang were answered. She redialed the number of her boyfriend, Cary Smyslov, and listened to it ring eight, nine, ten times before hanging up. She paused, considered for a moment, and dialed the number of her aunt in Vermont.

The phone was answered on the third ring. “Hello?” The voice was weak and tremulous, but it was definitely her aunt

“Aunt Dawn, this is Suzy in Brooklyn. I’m in big trouble here—”

“Suzy.” It seemed to take time for the name to sink in.

“Yes, you know, Suzy. Suzy McKenzie.”

“Honey, I’m not hearing too well now.” Aunt Dawn was thirty-one years old, no decrepit old woman, but she didn’t sound at all well.

“Mom’s sick, maybe she’s dead, I don’t know, and Kenneth and Howard, and nobody’s around, or everybody’s sick, I don’t know—”

“I’m kind of under the weather, myself,” Aunt Dawn said. “Got these bumps. Your uncle’s gone, or maybe he’s out in the garage. Anyway he hasn’t been in here for…” She paused. “Since last night. He went out talking to himself. Not back yet. Honey—”

“What is going on?” Suzy asked, her voice cracking.

“Honey, I don’t know, but I can’t talk anymore, I think I’m going crazy. Good-bye, Suzy.” And then, incredibly, she hung up. Suzy tried ringing again, but there was no answer and finally, on the third attempt, not even a ringing sound.

She was about to open the phone book and begin dialing at random, but she thought better of it and returned to the kitchen. She might be able to do something-keep them cool, or warm, or bring whatever medicine was in the house.

Her mother looked thinner. The ridges seemed to have collapsed on her face and arms. Suzy reached out to touch her mother’s face, hesitated, then forced herself. The skin was warm and dry, not feverish, normal enough except for its appearance. Her mother’s eyes opened.

“Oh, Mother,” Suzy sobbed. “What’s happening?”

“Well,” her mother said, tongue licking at her lips, “it’s quite beautiful, actually. You’re all right, aren’t you? Oh, Suzy.” And then she shut her eyes and said no more. Suzy turned to Howard sitting in the chair. She touched him on the arm and jumped back as the skin seemed to deflate. Only then did she notice the network of root-like tubes extending from the cuffs of his jeans, vanishing into the crevice between the floor and the wall.

More roots stretched from Kenneth’s paste-colored arms into the pantry. And behind her mother, reaching over her skirt and into the cabinet beneath the sink, was a single thick pipe of pale flesh. Suzy thought wildly for a moment of horror movies and makeup and maybe they were shooting a movie and hadn’t told her. She bent closer to peer behind her mother. She was no expert, but the pipe of flesh wasn’t makeup. She could see blood pulsing in it.

Suzy climbed slowly back up the stairs to her bedroom. She sat on the bed, braiding and unbraiding her long blond hair with her fingers, then lay back and stared at the very old silvery linoleum on the ceiling. “Jesus, please come and help me, because I need you now,” she said. “Jesus, please come and help me, because I need you now.”

And so on, into the afternoon, when thirst drove her to the bathroom for a drink. Around her gulps of water, she repeated her prayer, until the monotony and futility silenced her. She stood by the banister, still in her sky-blue robe, and began to make plans. She wasn’t sick—not yet—and she certainly wasn’t dead.

So there had to be something to do, someplace to go.

And still, in the back of her mind, she hoped that perhaps in the way she opened a door, or on some path she might follow through the streets, she could find her way back to the old world. She didn’t think it was likely, but anything was worth the chance.

There were some tough decisions to be made. What good was all her education and special training if she couldn’t think for herself and make tough decisions? She did not want to go into the kitchen any more than she had to, but food was in the kitchen. She could try entering other houses, or even the grocery store at the end of the block, but she suspected there would be other bodies there.

At least these bodies—alive or dead—were her relatives.

She entered the kitchen with her head held high. Gradually, as she went from cabinet to cabinet and then to the refrigerator, her eyes lowered. The bodies had collapsed even further; Kenneth seemed little more than a filament-covered white patch in wrinkled clothes. The fleshy roots into the pantry had gone straight for the plumbing, climbing up into the small sink and into the water tap, as well as down the drain. At any minute she expected something to reach out and grab her—or for Howard or her mother to turn into lurching zombies—and she gritted her teeth until her jaws ached, but none of them moved. They no longer looked like they could move.

She emerged with a box full of all the canned goods she thought she would need for the next few days—and the can opener, which she had almost forgotten.

It was dusk by the time she thought to turn on the radio. They hadn’t had a television since the last set broke beyond repair its hulk sat in the foyer under the stairs, gathering dust behind boxes of old magazines. She pulled out the multiband portable her mother kept for emergencies and methodically searched the dials. She had once play-acted at being a ham radio operator, but of course the portable couldn’t send anything.

Not a single station played on AM or FM. She picked up signals on the short wave bands—some very dear—but none in English.

The room was rapidly darkening now. She agonized before trying to switch on the lights. If everybody was sick, would there still be lights?

When the shadows had filled the living room and there was no avoiding the dilemma—either sit in the dark, or find out whether she would have to sit in the dark—she reached up to the big reading lamp beside the couch and turned the switch quickly.

The light came on, strong and steady.

This broke a very weak dam in her, and she began to mourn. She rocked back and forth on her curled-up legs on the couch and keened like someone demented, her face wet, hands braiding and unbralding her hair and using it to dry her face until it hung in damp strips down to her collarbone. With the single light casting a golden crescent over her face, she wept until her throat ached and she could barely keep her eyes open.

Without eating, she went upstairs, switching on all the lights—each steady glow a miracle—and crawled into her bed, where she could not sleep, imagining she heard someone coming up the stairs, or walking down the hall toward her door.

The night lasted an eternity, and in that time Suzy became a little more mature, or a little crazier, she couldn’t decide which. Some things no longer mattered much. She was quite willing, for example, to forego her past life and find a new way to live. She made this concession in the hopes that whatever was in charge would simply allow the lights to keep burning.

By dawn she was a physical wreck-exhausted, hungry but unwilling to eat, her whole body tense and wrung out from terror and watchfulness. She drank from the bathroom tap again…and suddenly thought of the roots leading into the plumbing. Retching, Suzy sat down on the toilet and watched the water pour clean and clear from the tap. Thirst finally compelled her to take the chance and drink more, but she vowed to lay in a supply of bottled water.

She prepared a cold meal of green beans and corned beef hash in the living room, and was hungry enough to throw in a can of plums in heavy syrup for good measure. The cans stood in a row on the battered coffee table. She sipped the last of the plum syrup; nothing had ever tasted so good.

She returned to her bedroom and lay down, and this time slept for five hours, until awakened by a noise. Something heavy had fallen within the house. Cautiously, she descended the stairs and looked around the foyer and living room.

“Not the kitchen,” she said, and knew immediately that was where the sound had come from. She opened the swinging door slowly. Her mother’s clothes—but not her mother—lay in a pile before the sink. Suzy entered and looked at where Kenneth had been in the pantry. Clothes, but nothing else. She turned.

Howard’s jeans hung from the seat of the stool, which had toppled to one side. A glistening pale brown sheet hung down along the whole wall, neatly edged into the cornices, protruding slightly where it covered a framed print.