The Missing (14 page)

He looked at Danny, but on his face there was no sign of recognition. Light poured over the lawn, and he started to run. Still on all fours, he charged across the yard, and through the Wintrobs’ morning glories. Like an animal, his hind legs pushed him in the air, and his arms caught him when he came down. The bottoms of his feet and the toes he still had were black.

Danny took a few breaths, in and out. Fast. From

what felt like a thousand miles away, he could hear his dad slam the Mercedes’s heavy door. On the ground was the husk of a rabbit. All that was left was its skin, a few slivers of meat along its spine, and the imprint of James’s small teeth.

PART THREE
‌

INFECTION

N I N E
‌

The Human Trick

T

he search for James Walker continued long after the sun had set on Tuesday evening. Cops and vol- unteers combed the Bedford woods. At a clearing two miles in, Tim Carroll stumbled. He shone his flashlight along the edges of the glade, and saw that it was scat- tered with animal carcasses. He’d caught his foot on an antelope’s horns, and he focused his light on its unblink- ing eyes. It clutched a mouthful of a possum’s snout be- tween its teeth. The ground was inky with their blood. He whistled out his breath. Then he shone his light along the circle, and saw that all the animals’ teeth were bared. He took a step back, and he knew that James Walker hadn’t been abducted by a pedophile. The boy had found this terrible place, where the animals had

learned a human trick. They’d learned murder.

That’s when he heard the scream. It sounded like another animal, but by his flashlight, he found Lois Larkin kneeling over a hole in the center of the clear- ing. Her mouth was ringed with dirt. Like the antelope, her eyes were black. “Lois!” he shouted. She didn’t stop screaming until he took off his standard-issue wool peacoat and draped it over her shoulders.

124 Sarah Langan

“I saw James,” Danny Walker told his parents late Tuesday night. “He killed another rabbit.”

Miller Walker stabbed his index finger into the middle of Danny’s chest hard enough to leave a bruise. “Shut up about that fucking rabbit,” he said.

Wednesday morning, the search expanded, and state troopers from Augusta, along with volunteers, called James’s name. The search area widened through the town of Bedford to the edges of Corpus Christi. Still, he was not found.

Lois Larkin woke Wednesday morning with a chest cold and a wide-open window, even though, the night before, she’d left it closed. The morning light hurt her eyes, so she rolled over and hid her face under the sheets. Depression, she guessed. Her life had gone south fast. It wasn’t until late afternoon that she noticed the pile of feathers on her windowsill. She kept a feeder for hummingbirds out there. Had a dog gotten to one of them, and left the feathers for her as a gift? She ran her tongue along the inside of her mouth, and between her teeth. She pulled a string of feathery gristle from the gap. Before she realized what she was doing, she sucked out the last of its blood.

Meg Wintrob didn’t go to work Wednesday morning. Fenstad told her to stay home, and that was all the per- mission to bum around that she needed. She read the
Boston Globe
in front of
Days of Our Lives
,
Oprah
, and
Dr. Phil
. By three o’clock she was so bored that she’d finished the crossword puzzle and was scrawling items like “Clean the grout under the refrigerator” on her things-to-do list. It occurred to her that she didn’t know how to relax.

Fenstad went to work as usual on Wednesday. His first order of business was to call Lila Schiffer. He’d wanted to keep her in the hospital yesterday, but when

he’d learned about Meg’s attack, he’d forgotten. Lila was passive-aggressive, and it wasn’t beneath her to slit her other wrist just to spite him for his negligence. Turned out, he needn’t have worried. Wednesday morn- ing Lila answered the phone unharmed and nearly chip- per. Her kids were both sick with chest colds, and she was tending to them. They’d been so grateful for her cinnamon toast and back rubs that they’d called her “Mom” for the first time in months. She told him, “Maybe it’s the Stelazine, Dr. Wintrob. But suddenly I’m in a super-good mood. See you next week!”

As the sun set Wednesday night, Lois Larkin lay in bed with the taste of salty gristle on her tongue. Her stomach growled, and a hazy memory returned to her, of opening the window the night before, and reaching into the bird feeder. She admitted to herself the thing she’d been trying to deny: Something lived inside her now, and in the darkness, it began to speak.

It was hard for James to understand words now, and he didn’t recognize faces. He didn’t remember about the hollow trees anymore, or the Incredible Hulk. He’d lost something, parts of him. What was the word? Hands? No, not hands. Something else. Shoes. He’d lost pieces of the things that went inside shoes.

Last night he’d visited half the houses of the children in his fourth-grade class. He’d wanted to show them what he’d become. That he was special. Sometimes he bit them. Other times he just spit. Now he climbed ter- races and backyard porches, and returned for the rest of them. As Wednesday rolled into Thursday, the virus continued to spread.

T E N
‌

Babes in the Woods

T

hursday afternoon, Madeline Wintrob pedaled her twelve-speed Trek down Silver Street. She didn’t drive like the other seniors at Corpus Christi High School. Her brother, David, got the junker Volvo sta- tion wagon when he left for college in California, and since nobody thought she was responsible enough to drive, she hadn’t bothered suffering through six Satur-

day morning sessions of driver’s education.

She didn’t want a car anyway. Because of cars the polar ice caps would dissolve in one hundred years, and winter would be a memory. Currency wouldn’t be dol- lars anymore; it would be grain and livestock. Relent- less tropical storms would make the East Coast uninhabitable, and Canada would close its borders so there’d be no place to flee but Mexico—and who wanted to go there? Her ruling class pigs-for-parents were wor- ried about the thread counts of their Egyptian sheets and the fuel efficiency of their SUV death machines, meanwhile the end of the world was on it way. So fine, her whole family thought she was nuts. They were wrong. She wasn’t nuts; it was the rest of this world that was off its rocker.

She was cutting school right now to meet Enrique in

the woods. Last class of the day, home ec. Right now everybody else was learning how to pour Cheez Whiz over a two-minute nuked potato, and she was free. She wasn’t going to be like all the other robots who put one foot in front of the other their whole lives and burned their time like it was made of wood. She was going to make every second count.

The sky overhead was blue as a deep lake, and the air had to be at least seventy degrees. She frowned: global warming, no doubt. When people got old they stopped caring about stuff like greenhouse gases and melting ice caps. They bought houses on credit so they couldn’t quit their jobs, and they got so tired from living lives they hated that their hearts dried up like clotted blood. That would never happen to her. Her heart would al- ways bleed, even if it hurt. Someone’s had to.

She couldn’t
help
caring about this stuff! Even if she wanted, she’d never be one of those girls with blow- dried hair and pink lip gloss who got perfect grades in lame classes and wrote fashion editorials for the school paper. The world was colliding toward disaster, for crap’s sake, so who cared about pencil skirts? Sure, people
acted
like rising estrogen rates in drinking wa- ter that would one day make men sterile were a big deal. Her parents always pseudo sympathized when she freaked out about the hormone-infested Omaha Steaks they served every time David visited, like his ar- rival was the frickin’ second coming. They nodded their heads like they cared about eating lower on the food chain, and then they slathered their cow offal with A.1. sauce.

Her mom had really been pissing her off lately. Last night she’d limped around the kitchen like Captain Ahab after Moby Dick bit off his leg. For a while Maddie’d wanted to bitch-slap Albert Sanguine for what he’d done.

Seriously. What kind of guy hits somebody’s mom? But then at dinner, Meg made her eat five bites of a cheese lasagna even though she wasn’t hungry. All night it sat in her stomach like a tub of lard. She was force fed like one of those caged sows PETA was always trying to free, and she’d started thinking that short of a permanent injury, Meg Wintrob deserved what she got.

Still, this morning had been pretty neat. She’d come down the stairs to find her parents kissing, which she hadn’t seen for at least a year. They left for work before she left for school, and when they did they both kissed her good-bye. Each parent got a cheek. It was totally gay. She told them they were complete dipshits even while they did it. Meanwhile, she’d liked it so much she hadn’t ever wanted to leave her chair, just so she could wallow in that good feeling.

As soon as they were gone she’d thought: Love is in the air, so why not today?

“Of course,” Enrique had said when she’d called this morning to see if he was up for an afternoon in the woods. Then she’d added,
And bring the thing
. “What thing?” he’d asked. She’d wanted him to guess, but it busted out of her like an explosion:
The rubbers!

“Oh. Right . . . Okay,” he’d told her.

Hooray!

Now, she pedaled. She was wearing high-top Con- verse sneakers and lace thigh-highs, a knee-length felt skirt with a slit up the side, and a red wool cardigan. The outfit was ridiculous, she knew, but it suited her. Plus, if you’re gonna have purple hair, you might as well look the part. People had stared at her at school today, and she’d even noticed a couple of full-on point- ers, but that was fine. Today was all about whims and loud colors and getting exactly what she wanted. She smiled and pedaled faster. The lines to a song were

playing in her mind: “Girl, you’ll be a woman, soon.” She couldn’t frickin’ wait!

He was standing at the edge of the woods where they’d agreed to meet. Clenched in his hands were corn- flower blue daisies from the Puffin Stop. She giggled even though she didn’t think the flowers were funny; she thought they were romantic.

He was dark-skinned and small, and no matter how much she dieted, she’d probably always outweigh him. His family was from Mexico, so he rolled his Rs and chose his words carefully like he was translating from the Spanish in his mind. When she hopped off her bike, he grabbed the handlebar and steered it into the woods for her. She loved that he did that kind of manly stuff. It was one of the many things that made him perfect.

When they got a few feet inside the woods he leaned the bike next to his moped and turned to her. Some sticks were tangled in her hair, and he pulled them out. She giggled because it reminded her of the way mon- keys groomed each other: They combed their fingers through their mate’s pelts, then picked out the lice and ate them. That was the two of them: a pair of monkeys. This made her think of sea monkeys, and those lounge chairs they were supposed to sit on at the bottom of fish tanks, which made her giggle even more.

Enrique kept walking. He’d forgotten to give her the daisies. The branches hit the flowers so that their bright blue petals glided in a trail behind them. At least if they got lost they’d find their way out. He was being really quiet. He hadn’t even kissed her hello. She knew it was silly to think, but still she wondered: Was he having second thoughts?

They’d been dating for almost a year. In gym class the girls were always talking about sex and blow jobs. Or- gasms. Jizz. Gross stuff that made her blush, not because

it was gross, but because she found herself nodding, even though she’d never done it. She found herself pretending to be a woman, even though she wasn’t yet.

But the last couple of months, even after she told him she wanted it, he’d stalled. Every time they got hot and heavy he invented some excuse, like the back of his dad’s hatchback wasn’t classy enough. He said he wanted to wait for the right time, but she was starting to think he wanted to wait for the right person, who happened
not
to be neurotic Maddie Wintrob. She started to think that he’d rather find a nice Mexican girl with big eyes like Natalie Wood from
West Side Story
, who would never pick fights and who knew how to cook a grilled cheese without burning it. Who could blame him? She knew she was a weirdo. But then again, she did blame him. The world made sense when they were together, and with each day he made her wait because he’d de- cided to treat her like a flower instead of a girl, she trusted him less, and he killed the thing between them a tiny bit more.

“If you’re being all quiet because you’re going to dump me, you’re in a lot of trouble,” she said. “I mean it. I’ll beat you up.”

Enrique shook his head in mock disappointment. “Madeline,” he muttered. “You’re so crazy.” His accent wrapped around her name like the Mexican flag: “MAD-e-LINE,” and she was immediately reassured.