The Extinction Event

 

Begin Reading

Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

 

Thank you for buying this

Tom Doherty Associates ebook.

 

To receive special offers, bonus content,

and info on new releases and other great reads,

sign up for our newsletters.

 

Or visit us online at

us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

 

For email updates on the author, click
here
.

 

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce, or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at:
us.macmillanusa.com/piracy
.

 

For Barbara, Susannah, and Toby

and Alec, Chris, Richard

and Elaine Kaufman

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To my agent and friend, Mel Berger, who told me I should write the book; my publisher, Tom Doherty, who believed in the project; my editor, the extraordinary Bob Gleason, who kept me honest; and his assistant, Ashley Cardiff, who did work above and beyond the call of duty.

 

They, hand in hand, with wand'ring steps and slow,

Through Eden took their solitary way.

Milton,
Paradise Lost

PROLOGUE

The Hudson Valley Electric Company pylons stalked like
War of the Worlds
tripods down the hillside, across the field, and through the Rip Van Winkle Trailer Park five miles outside Mycenae, New York.

Inside a double-wide trailer with gardenia-filled window boxes, eight-year-old Kim Janette lay in bed, gazing out her louvered window at the clouds scudding across the moon, low to the horizon, huge, yam orange. Stars were coming out, bright points on the darkening sky as if the heavens were a photograph being developed.

Craning her neck, she made out one of the Dippers she'd learned about in school. Big Dipper? Small Dipper? No,
Little
Dipper … Big, Little—she wasn't sure. But the constellation, which seemed to hang close to the Earth, too close to the Earth, made her feel claustrophobic.

The wind was rising, scratching a branch across the trailer roof. In the distance, on a far-off farm, bulls—she thought they were bulls—made a sound like a bureau being scraped across a floor. She shivered. Probably, she told herself, frightened, from her fever. One hundred and two point four when her mother took it before dinner. Low. For her.

She tried to remember back before she was sick. All she could conjure up was a memory of sitting with her mother somewhere, picking wild strawberries, small as her fingernails, sweet. Her mother's mouth dripped with juice. Even her teeth were stained red.

The branch—was it a branch?—scratched the trailer roof again. Again, she shivered. Her eyes were hot. They'd probably take her back to the hospital. Soon. She hated the Emergency Room waiting area with its cracked orange and yellow plastic chairs and the daytime TV program with the sound turned so low you couldn't hear what people were saying. Waiting sometimes as long as an hour, or more, to be admitted. Then, waiting another hour while she shivered naked under the paper smock they made her wear. Listening to her mother go over the story again from the beginning.

Why couldn't she see the same doctor every time?

As a doctor talked, her mother clamped her mouth shut, so tight her lips turned pale.

Kim knew the doctor's question made her mother angry. Knew why it made her angry.

We can't afford it.

Watching the moon rise and lose its bloody glow, becoming smaller, more silvery, Kim tried to imagine what it would be like when she got better. First thing, she told herself, she'd ask her mother to take her back to the wild strawberries. They could sit in the field, as they had before she got sick, and eat the tiny berries, their lips getting red with the juice.

Maybe the image caused her hemorrhage. When she tried to call her mother, the blood rising from her throat, filling her mouth, made her cough, gag. She tried unsuccessfully to call again. Her mouth filled with blood. She was ashamed: the sheets, blanket would have to be changed again. Washed again. More money wasted.

Hopelessly, she watched the moon, now small as a quarter, and far, far away—as far as the stars, which had also retreated. Left her behind.

She tried to swallow back the blood. But it kept coming, spilling from her mouth even though she tried to clamp her lips shut to keep it from messing the bedding.

Surrendering to the almost luxurious feeling of getting light-headed, she thought, at least tonight she wouldn't hear the ghosts, who most nights muttered to her in a language she couldn't understand.

The sky—moon, stars—were now so far away she couldn't see them.

Part One

JACK

CHAPTER ONE

1

“Oh, God,” the man said. “Oh, God…”

“Sometimes to get over the fence, you need a little boost,” said the hooker he was in bed with. “Hang on, honey.”

The hooker, Jean Gaynor, wriggled out from under her john and on hands and knees crawled across the sagging king-sized mattress to the foot of the bed in the motel room. Mottled ass in the air, her prominent vertebrae like a ridged prehistoric backbone, she leaned over and fumbled for a tumbler, which she examined. The glass was dirty, streaked with a little cloudy water on the bottom.

“Hang on, Chief,” Jean said.

She stumbled out of bed and lurched into the bathroom. The man, Frank Milhet, who was almost three times Jean's age, rolled over onto his back and gazed at the stained ceiling with unfocused eyes. The stain resolved itself into a cow, a continent, a face … Like Jean, Milhet was naked. Unlike Jean, who had been partying for three days with other marks and had a gray pallor, Milhet was flushed pink. An unhealthy pink. The pink from a Saturday-morning cartoon.

Earlier that night, Milhet had met Jean in the bar attached to the office of the Dutch Village Motel, a one-story, pale-blue-shingled hot-sheet dump on County Route 9, a few miles north of Niverville, New York. Across the road was a cornfield. The shoulder-high stalks clattered in the August heat. Even at ten o'clock at night, the air was still, stifling, oppressive. It carried a whiff of damp ashes. Somewhere, far off, someone tried to start a lawn mower. Over and over. Unsuccessfully. Maybe someone who couldn't sleep. Or someone who just got home from a swing shift. Or someone soon to leave home for the lobster shift. Moonlight made everything shine like new tin.

Squatting on top of the far right end of the motel office building was a fake windmill. Each vane was made of two rows of nine-inch squares that, without sailcloth, looked like empty window frames. The vanes were bolted in place. A high wind would shatter them before they ever turned. The neon sign arched between the bottom two vanes advertised
Color TV, in-house channels
and displayed, outlined in the neon tubes, a reclining figure in thigh-high boots that was supposed to represent Rip Van Winkle, sleeping soundly, presumably undistracted by the motel's
in-house channels
, which carried one old VCR loop of
Rear Action Babes
. Spaced in a neat row in front of the individual cabins were five early-sixties concave circular chairs, like an array of miniature radio-telescopes.

When Milhet spotted Jean in the bar, about six-thirty that evening, she was sitting in one of the cracked, burgundy-leather banquettes, nursing an Irish whiskey, a pencil-mustache of whipped cream on her upper lip, eyes prowling the nearly empty room for a mark, for someone who could slip her a quick thirty for a gram of coke—more cut, mannitol baby laxative than coke—which the bartender kept behind the bar in the Yellow Pages, filed humorously, he thought, under
fishing, supplies
.

Over the front door, ill-fit in a rectangle that looked recently cut, wooden bristles along the saw-lines, new curdled-cream-colored foam tucked around the machine, an ancient, rust-speckled air conditioner rhythmically groaned, loud-soft, loud-soft, like a man suffering from the heat.

The bar had a funk of stale tobacco, cats, sour beer, and a cloying antiseptic stink wafting in from the candy floss–colored deodorizing pucks in the men's room urinals.

Through the opening door—as Milhet entered—came the sound of the distant lawn mower engine catching, a roar as it started up diminishing to a purr as it continued. The closing door cut off the sound.

Jean sat facing the bar, her back reflected in a mirror on the opposite wall. The spiderweb of black cracks in the cloudy glass gave the impression of an old-fashioned photographic plate of the Milky Way, and through that cosmic-looking tangle you could see the black roots at the back of Jean's blond head. It also reflected Milhet, facing the mirror, sliding, back to the bar, onto a high stool, his eyes, like Jean's, predatory.

Jean smiled. Milhet smiled.

She hadn't expected him to be there. He knew she was always there.Within half an hour, they were in the motel room, laying out lines on the scarred bureau top. A broken drawer angled out of the bureau front. A single straight-backed wooden chair lay on its side on the floor, knocked over when they entered the room and Milhet reached around Jean and grabbed her ass, which she professionally twitched.

A cracked lamp with a bare red bulb cast a bloody light. The TV, which was on when they entered the room, broadcast news about a hurricane, baptized Ruby. A satellite photo of the Gulf Coast from Tallahassee to Mobile filled the TV screen with the hurricane's whorl, which looked like a giant thumb print.

“A westward moving tropical wave is producing high winds and an advisory…,” the TV newscaster was saying. “Global warming may increase the frequency and intensity of…” Milhet was having trouble focusing. “Moving northeast liable to make landfall sometime tomorrow morning at…”

Through the open bathroom door, Milhet gazed with zombie eyes at Jean, who rinsed the glass, filled it two-thirds with fresh water, and, unfolding an origami-like paper bindle, spilled in a gram of coke. She lit a small butane torch and heated the solution, constantly swirling it, waiting for the drug, spiraling like an insignificant galaxy, to start crystallizing into a rock of crack.

“The trouble with immediate gratification,” Jean said, “is it takes so long.”

She dropped a pinch of baking powder into the glass, which cracked from the heat, spilling the solution.