Contaminated (7 page)

The ThinPro diet plan was everywhere. High protein, low carbs, six small meals a day. The weight, according to the ads, would fly right off. They had special candy bars, cereal, bread, pasta, protein bars … the works. And, of course, the water.

All kosher! All vegan! No animal products used! Protein water was already popular, but sales of the ThinPro water went through the roof. Even people not on the diet bought it and drank it by the case. It was supposed to be the best, the healthiest. Not the cheapest, but that didn’t seem to matter. It was designer water, like shoes or purses or sunglasses. You couldn’t look anywhere and not find a vending machine dispensing it or see it in some starlet’s hand at some red-carpet party. Even the president drank it.

My dad bought cases of it. He guzzled it. And, yeah, he lost weight. Dropped ten pounds in a couple of months, right from the start, while hardly exercising at all. My mom,
who was spending hours on the treadmill and not ever having dessert, held off a little longer, but pretty soon she was on ThinPro, too.

Why not? Everyone else was, at least everyone in America. It was so popular, a famous late-night comedy show even started doing skits about it. I watched them, up late on a Saturday night with Tony on the couch beside me, both of us eating popcorn and drinking soda in between kisses. I didn’t think the skit was that funny when I saw it, but I’d laugh really hard if I saw it now.

The premise of the joke was that the ThinPro company had put something addictive in the water to keep people buying more and more. It was based on one of those urban myths that get passed along in email chains and posted on blogs. In the skit, the guest host gulped water from the bottles, spilling it down her face and over her body, while the others shouted “Chug! Chug! Chug!” until she started to twitch … and shake, and with a quick use of special effects makeup, she became a monster. In the skit she grew to Godzilla size and destroyed New York.

That might’ve been better than what really happened.

See, the diet did work, for whatever reason. And the product sold so well, they couldn’t keep up with the demand. Shelves were empty all over the place. People were getting into fistfights over it in convenience stores. The ThinPro manufacturers figured they’d better get some more, fast. The problem was, their suppliers couldn’t keep
up, either. So they did whatever businesses do when they can’t get what they need to make the product that’s paying for their kids’ college educations and trips to the Bahamas. They found another supplier.

Only someone wasn’t doing their homework, because the ThinPro water was supposed to be all kosher, all vegan, no animal products at all. The protein was supposed to come from chemicals or something like that—the same thing that the comedy skit had hinted was causing people to go a little crazy. The same ingredients other special interest groups were claiming caused cancer. When the suppliers couldn’t make whatever it was the protein had come from before, they substituted what they’d later claim was a “healthier” option than the manufactured proteins some people were protesting.

They used animal protein instead. Ground-up bits of leftovers from slaughterhouses. Chicken, mostly. Some beef. Some turkey, too. Whatever they could get for the cheapest price possible. They mixed it all up in whatever vats they used and poured it into bottles, and they rushed it onto shelves to meet the demand.

They got away with it.

ThinPro sales soared even higher as warmer weather encouraged more people to drink water. Temperatures rose; supplies dropped. They made more. Who knows what they did to it this time? Used more scraps? A different slaughterhouse? I know only what the news reports and the Internet
gossip say, and I haven’t had online access in a while to know if there’s anything new.

Whatever they did contaminated the water people were guzzling by the gallon. It had something to do with the protein—a while ago, there was a huge scare over in England about the mad cow disease people got after eating beef. The same thing happened with the water. They used contaminated chickens or turkeys or cows, and people drank it, and they got it. Only in humans, it was different from what it had been in animals.

In people, it made you into a crazy killer.

Not overnight, though it seemed like it. I noticed my dad losing his temper more often during that spring. He’d snap in ways he never had before. He’d forget he told us something and repeat it ten minutes later and get furious when we told him he’d already said it. He’d say one word when he meant another, and even though Opal and I both told him he’d said something else, he’d insist he was right. We were wrong.

He and Mom fought more, too. She hadn’t lost as much weight as he had. She claimed the ThinPro water tasted funny, and she was right. But she still drank it, because nothing tastes as good as being skinny feels. That was the slogan—not original—but really popular.

In elementary school, I had a friend whose parents both drank too much beer. They’d fight. Once her dad threw a chair through their TV. My parents didn’t drink booze, but they did get angrier after they’d had a few ThinPro waters.

Of course they weren’t alone. Factories all over the country were pumping out bottles of ThinPro, but apparently not all of them had switched the formula. Some people were getting the good old regular cancer-causing kind while others were drinking the crazy-making kind. It just depended on what shipment went where.

That’s why it didn’t happen all at the same time. Just a few cases, here and there. A few people going off the deep end, losing their marbles, going wackadoo, dropping their baskets. The stories made the news, but mostly only locally. At least until a movie star went nuts on the set of his latest film and someone recorded it. That little breakdown ended up circulating on every radio station and social networking site around. It even got set to a catchy dance beat that got played at all the proms that year with the curse words bleeped out. It was one long bunch of bleeps.

The first wave hit in mid-June, going on two years ago. A heat wave washed over the country. And finally, something broke. First one or two people, then more and more. They woke up and began their days, and somewhere along the way, something broke inside them, and they all just … lost it.

An “Epidemic of Rage” is what one headline called it, and “experts” speculated it was caused by the hottest spring on record for the past eighty years, along with what was shaping up to be an even hotter summer. Social media specialists said it was because we’d all become too accustomed
to using the Internet, that manners were disappearing. Old people said it was young people who hadn’t been brought up right, and young people said it was because old people were too old. Maybe that was all part of it, but the real reason was that ThinPro water had eaten holes in people’s brains.

We call it the Contamination or the Hollywood virus, but the official name for it is Frank’s syndrome, after the doctor who finally figured out the source. Frank’s syndrome causes loss of impulse control and increased aggression. It mimics the effects of stroke as well as several kinds of drug use. So far as anyone knows, it can’t be cured or reversed, though it can be controlled. Basically, anyone who drank the contaminated water has the potential to get the disease, even now, months and months after they pulled the product off the market. People who drank more had a higher chance of getting it, but all it takes, really, is one bottle.

When it hit Lebanon, my parents had both gone to work. Opal and I were home alone. I was sleeping in to enjoy the first days of summer break. The house was quiet, until I heard the neighbors’ dogs barking. They barked a lot, but not like this. Not for so long or so loud. I got up, went downstairs. Opal was at the table eating cereal and reading a book.

I still thought nothing of it until the dogs, two of them from next door, ran up onto our back deck. Snapping and biting, they paced in front of the sliding glass doors, tails tucked between their legs. They were begging to get
in—something they’d never done, even when they came over to crap in our yard. Our neighbors’ dogs were Rottweilers, by the way. Nice dogs, but not timid. They’d run off a meter reader or two before our neighbor got electric collars for them. It had never stopped them from running over here.

“What’s going on with Tooty and Frooty?” Opal asked me.

Before I could answer, Craig from next door stumbled onto the deck. He was wearing a bathing suit, which wasn’t that unusual since they’d put in a pool the year before, and it was hot out. The lack of balance wasn’t that surprising, either, since if he was out by the pool, he usually had a couple of beers, too. What did make both of us cry out and back up was the way he staggered into the glass door.

Full on, his head smacked the glass so hard, it broke into stars but didn’t shatter. Bright red blood showed up on his forehead and started streaming down his face. His mouth worked like he was shouting, but I couldn’t hear anything except the barking. The dogs circled his feet, dodging his kicks.

Craig never hit his dogs. They were as much his children as his real kids were. Maybe more, since the dogs usually obeyed him, and his kids mostly didn’t. His dogs were allowed to sleep on his bed with him. They rode in his truck with him. And now he was kicking at them, screaming so loud, the veins stood out on his bloody face.

“What’s the matter with Craig?” Opal cried. She took my hand and held it tight.

“I don’t know!”

“We need to call Mom!”

Craig turned. His eyes looked bloodshot. His teeth had blood in them when he grinned. He walked into the glass again. And again. As hard as he could each time, like nothing even hurt him. His nose squashed against his face. The next time he grinned, I saw he’d lost a tooth.

“He’s going to get in! He’s gonna get in, Velvet! Stop him!”

I didn’t know how to stop him. I was still in my pajamas, my breath sour, my eyes crusty. I thought maybe I was dreaming until Opal’s fingernails cut into the skin of my hand.

I thought of a weapon, grabbing a knife or trying to find something else. “Upstairs, Opal, run! Mom and Dad’s room!”

We ran, reaching the foot of the stairs just as Craig finally broke through it. We went up the stairs on hands and feet, pushing ourselves. I slammed the door to my parents’ room at the top of the hall. I locked the door. We could hear Craig downstairs, screaming. He wasn’t saying any words, just screaming. Loud, sharp bursts of noise. Opal clamped her hands over her ears.

I tried to shove the dresser in front of the door, but my parents’ TV was too big and heavy. It was really old, still had a VCR built into it, and was twice the size of the big flat-screen downstairs. I shoved, I pushed, but the dresser didn’t move.

I didn’t think about pushing the TV off. It would’ve broken, and my mom and dad would be angry. How did I know that it wasn’t just Craig who’d gone insane? How did I know that somewhere out there in the street, my dad was doing the same thing to someone else’s daughters while my mom was trying to get home to us, unable to because the roads had all been blocked?

There were windows in there, but nothing close to the ground. My mind raced through all the scenarios my parents had ever put us through. They trusted me here, alone with Opal. They were counting on me, and so was she.

Fire? The fire ladder was at the end of the hall. I’d run through flames before I’d run out in front of Craig, who by then was pounding up the stairs.

Tornado? We were supposed to hide in the basement, in the closet beneath the stairs. Wrong choice for this situation.

It felt like years before I got it, though it could only have been a few seconds. My dad had a golf club under the bed. Once I’d asked him what it was for, and he’d told me, “It’s for when the serial killer comes in the middle of the night. Or the zombies.” I’d never appreciated my dad’s sense of humor or his preparedness so much as I did right then.

“Get the club,” he’d said matter-of-factly over pizza and cards one night while my mom was out at the movies with some friends. We were going over all the emergency procedures we should use if my parents weren’t home. “But you won’t use it unless you have to. While whoever’s there
is pounding on the door, you take Opal and run into the bathroom. Get into the cubbyhole. Pull it shut behind you; that will buy you some time. You’ll have to pull up the board on the floor, but I left it loose, just in case.”

“Oh, Dad.” I was laughing, but Opal was all ears.

“And then what, Daddy?”

“Then you push out the panel in the garage ceiling just below it. You can jump down into the garage from there. Get out of the house. And then just run. If it’s dark, hide in the woods.”

“Will a serial killer still be able to find us, Daddy?”

My dad had looked solemn, though there was a twinkle in his eyes to make all of this less scary. “Not if you’re very quiet and it’s dark. And if it’s daytime, you just run as fast as you can across the street to Garry and Hope’s house.”

“But, Dad, what if it’s a zombie?”

“Then,” my dad had said, “there will be more than one, and you need to be extra careful to figure out if they’re the slow kind or the fast kind.”

“You watch too many scary movies, Dad,” I’d told him.

Turns out, my dad wasn’t the only one. His plan worked, by the way. It got me and Opal out of the house just fine. In our pajamas, we ran across the street to Garry and Hope’s house. He greeted us at the door with a shotgun and urged us inside. On the news, reports of all kinds of crazy things were coming in.

“I’ve never been a religious man,” Garry had said, “but
if you girls haven’t taken Jesus as your Lord and Savior, I think maybe you’d better think about it.”

“We’re already Catholic,” Opal had told him.

It’s funny what stands out in memories. That made me laugh at the time, what she said, mostly because Garry looked like she’d told him she’d stepped in dog crap and wiped her feet on his living room sofa. What difference did Jesus make just then? Still, it was his wife who shushed him and brought us cold cans of soda to drink while Garry went around to all the windows and boarded them up.