The Missing (30 page)

Tonight her urine had behaved admirably, and re- fused to make a plus sign. Life was good. Life was spectacular, and she was
never
going to mess it up again. On her walk, she wandered toward the south side of town near the highway. She’d forgotten about the quarantine. She’d forgotten about everything, ex- cept that in eight months, she wasn’t going to be the girl that everybody pointed at like an After School Special. It was dark, and the grass was wet and cold. She started to run through it, because she felt so good, and happy. The bullet hit her between the eyes. She was still smiling as she lay on the ground. She was killed instantly.

Sunday morning, the survivors opened their eyes to a changed town.

Enrique Vargas’s mother sat in the kitchen with her husband. Their eldest son had never come home last night. First the army, now this. If they had known how their lives were going to turn out, they would have stayed in Mexico. Enrique’s mother hid her face. “Don’t,” her husband whispered, and she didn’t shed a single tear.

Down the road, Ronnie Koehler slapped the doze button on his alarm for the seventh time, meaning he’d be at least an hour late for breakfast with his parents. Good thing his dad was going to retire soon; he could stop shining him for a raise. Bad thing, too, because the bank might finally fire him. The alarm started ringing again, and he remembered: Brunch was canceled. His

parents were sick. Beside him Noreen didn’t rouse, not even to hurl the eleven-year-old Sam’s Club Timex in- digo alarm clock at his head, or to call him a nincom- poop. Her body was cold, but she was still breathing. A patient bit her arm last night at the hospital, and she’d gotten the virus. She’d been up coughing half the night, but at least now she was getting some rest.

After smoking a bowl he opened the front door, but the Sunday paper wasn’t on the stoop. Instead he found a brown paper bag. He opened it and broke into a sweat. It was a horse’s tail. Somebody had gone Don Corleone on his ass! He lifted it from the bag. It was black and thick. He held it for a while before he real- ized the truth. It was Lois Larkin’s hair.

Lila Schiffer lay in a hospital bed with her eyes open at dawn’s first light. She was the sole patient locked in- side the Corpus Christi Hospital mental ward, and the staff had forgotten about her. She hadn’t eaten in more than a day, and though etiquette would have had her feign a lost appetite, she was
starving.
As soon as the sun went down last night, the screams began. From outside her door, she’d heard someone, maybe that nice nurse who’d given her a copy of
O
Magazine, cry “Jeeze—” And then there was squeaking, like sneakers running along the floor, and then a crash (a gurney? the front desk?) and then worse sounds. They begged for mercy, every one of them. She couldn’t guess how many. They all said the same things:
Please, don’t, stop it, oh God
. But the words were cut short by screams, and smacking lips, and grinding, like celery breaking. Lila curled herself into her cot and closed her eyes, but even with their voices lower pitched and monotone, she rec- ognized them. Outside the door, Aran and Alice giggled at the nurses as they died.

The people who went to work Sunday morning did

so because in their shock they needed the security of routine. Bankers turned on their computers and sent e-mails assuring clients that they were safe. Before Time-Warner’s signal went out Donald Leavitt of Morgan Stanley wrote: “The stories you’re hearing are exaggerated. I assure you that the current situation in Corpus Christi will in no way compromise my abil- ity to serve my clients. Please contact me if you have any concerns. In an effort to serve you during this time, I am extending my hours to eight p.m.” Then he logged off, and tried to rouse his slumbering wife, who’d stopped coughing early in the morning, and was now cold but still breathing. He rolled her over to her back. Her short page-boy haircut made her look like a lesbian, and for years he’d been trying to con- vince her to grow it out again. He crawled into bed next to her and whispered, “Don’t leave me.” Then he coughed.

Maddie Wintrob watched the sunrise out her window. The cherry of her cigarette glowed, and though she hadn’t gone to church since her mom had enrolled her in after-school religious studies when she was twelve, she said a prayer for Enrique’s safe passage home.

Meg Wintrob slept soundly. Her husband did not.

Danny Walker sat in a small, dark room in a house that quartered his mother’s remains. He was alone for the first time in his life, and he wept.

Albert Sanguine reached under his bed and found the last of his bread pudding. He drank it down to silence the virus inside him, and wondered if his suicide would be courageous, or cowardly.

As the living rose to face the day, the infected took their rest. They slept under rocks, and in their beds. They slept in hospital gurneys, in the woods, in piles stacked and ready for the hospital incinerator, and in

damp cellars. Their skin was cold, but their loved ones didn’t dare bury them; they saw small movements of the chest, flexing fingers and toes. They waited in the ominous silence of daylight.

As dawn ascended into day, the thing formerly known as Lois Larkin lay in a clearing in the woods, surrounded by two thousand infected creatures of the night.

T W E N T Y - F I V E
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It’s Okay to Eat Fish, ’Cause They Don’t Have Any Feelings

F

enstad pulled into the hospital parking lot. Not a single car was on the road at nine a.m. that morn-

ing. Traffic l

ights, when illuminated at all, blinked a

cautious yellow warning. Throughout Corpus Christi, car and burglar alarms resounded, but no police ar- rived. The leaves of trees were turning red from the au- tumn chill. They were also dying, along with the lawns, weeds, and late-season tomato vines. He didn’t notice any of it. He was thinking about Meg.

He’d spent half his day yesterday cleaning bones from the lawn. There were hollow-boned bird remains, and marrow-chewed fox thighs. The German shepherd had been too big for the trash, so he’d stomped on its spine until it fit into the bag. And then, as he’d dry-heaved into the withering azalea bushes that lined the front of the house, he’d had an epiphany.

There were more bones on his lawn than on any other house on the block, which either meant that his family had been divinely marked for disaster, or that someone—a skinny Italian with a big mouth—was trying to break him. He figured it out right then. She’d heard him moaning about the dog in his sleep Tuesday

morning, and had devised a plan beneath her croco- dile tears. She’d seduced Graham Nero into killing Kaufmann, littered the lawn with butcher waste, and bribed Lois Larkin into playing the tit game, all so she could declare him insane and have herself a clean divorce.

He’d stood on the lawn with a Hefty bag full of dry bones, and peered at her pink skin through the dis- torted bedroom window on the second floor. His house. The beautifully steadfast Victorian with its original moldings and built-in bookcases. Its Persian rug in the hall worth seven grand. She was tearing it down. She was setting it on fire. She had to be stopped.

The moans out his window kept him awake all Satur- day night. He thought he was imagining them, the way he’d imagined Sara Wintrob in Lois Larkin’s bed. What else could they be, if not manufactured by his mind? Surely they weren’t screams.

Next to him, Meg had slept in the nude. She rolled into the crook of his arm and inserted her uninjured leg between his thighs. He realized then that he had all the proof of her faithlessness that he needed. Normally she’d be chewing a hole of nervousness into her cheek right now. With all that was happening with the virus, she’d be pacing the carpet off the floors. So why was she sleeping? Because she knew something he didn’t: There was no virus. She and Graham Nero had
planted
those bones.

As the sun rose, he reached over her still body and placed his hand just above her mouth and nose. The shadow of his fingers made her brows appear furrowed. He decided that if she woke, he’d smother her. If she slept, he’d leave her be. He teetered, like balancing on a long razor blade in bare feet. On which side of the blade would he fall?

After a while, Meg stirred. She squeezed her eyes tight, as if in her dream she was crying. He knew he should feel sympathy. This was his wife. He knew that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, be- cause these moans out his window sounded human. Still, he wanted to smother the bitch.

A tear rolled down the side of her face. After a while, she turned toward him, and, still sleeping, kissed his bare chest. Her lips were warm and wet. He rolled away from her, a failure. He could not hurt her. He loved her far too much.

The sun rose, but the day didn’t brighten. It was rain- ing out. Still, by 6 a.m., the night sounds (screaming!) resolved into quiet. The calendar on his alarm clock told him it was Sunday. A wave of worry hollowed out his stomach. When had he last been to work? Thurs- day? Would they fire him for breach of contract? Then he remembered the virus. And then he remembered Lila Schiffer. She’d been in lockup for days. With all this chaos, had anyone bothered to let her out? Had they even
fed
her? If he failed one more patient, he thought he really would lose his mind. He bolted out of bed, grabbed whatever clothes he could find, left Meg a note, and headed to the hospital to find Lila.

The streets were thick with morning fog. As he pulled out of his driveway, he didn’t notice the abandoned cop car where, during the night, the Simpson twins had been assigned to survey the Walker house. One brother had been bitten, and had turned on the other. His plea for help had awakened Maddie from a sound sleep, and now his bones lay scattered in the street. Fenstad’s Es- calade rolled by, and smashed them to dust. It sounded like passing over a pothole, and he saw what looked like chalk in his rearview mirror.

On the national news radio, Corpus Christi got a

scant mention. Instead of the normal news hour, the radio host was taking calls. A woman from Austin re- ported that she’d called an ambulance for her sick husband, who’d been coughing all day, but instead of an ambulance, an army truck arrived. They locked him in the back with the rest of the infected, some of whom were dead. She didn’t know where her husband was now. There were more calls. Fenstad turned off the radio, and rolled down the window so that his face got wet with drizzle. To calm him nerves, he whistled the Beach Boys’ “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” and wasn’t sure whether this reaction confirmed or disputed his sanity.

The hospital lot was quiet, and the few cars he recog- nized looked like they’d been parked there for days. Since Thursday night, the hospital’s main entrance had been blocked by CDC staff, but now the CDC was gone and the place looked abandoned. Not even the army was here. The automatic doors near the ICU opened and closed and opened again, as if waiting for a very late guest, while light drizzle fell.

He pulled up to the entrance and let the car idle. The large building was shaped like a rectangular collection of cinder blocks, topped off by a round widow’s peak. It was as still as a mausoleum, and he wondered how many of the dead or infected might be inside. “I don’t want to go in there,” he muttered as his windshield wip- ers swished. They made shadows like crashing waves against his face. In his mind he saw pretty Lila Schiffer’s bridge of freckles, and her crestfallen expression when he’d taken her children away.

He got out of the car and strode through the blinking electronic doors just as they opened for him, as if it was he they’d been waiting to swallow, all along.

The stench was thick, and sulfurous. His eyes watered,

and a wave of nausea passed through him like an elec- tric current. The hallway buzzed with fluorescence, and the generator hummed. There were no orderlies or nurses carrying mops or pills. No phones ringing. No doctors drawing blood, sipping coffee, complaining about HMOs. He didn’t even hear anyone coughing. Just the blinking electronic doors, and the wind that rushed through them, and sent papers and charts skittering along the floor like leaves.

He walked past Admitting and toward his office. There was an elevator, but he didn’t trust it to work, so he headed for the stairs. At the intersection between the ICU and Admitting, his eyes lingered on the red streaks along the white tiles that had dried like rust. They trav- eled in the direction of the yellow tape, and toward the basement.

Better run, Fennie
, he thought. In his mind, he saw Lois Larkin’s unbuttoned nightgown. His hand was on her breast, and she flashed a monstrous grin. Had he hit her the other day? Knocked out her tooth? He didn’t want to believe it, but the knuckles on his right fist were black and blue.

The stairway was empty, save for a bloody pair of pink scrubs. He gave it a wide berth as he walked, and he moved daintily, so that his shoes made no sound. He could feel something intelligent within the walls of this building, and it wasn’t human.

On the second floor, his office door was open. Papers were strewn across the desk, and files lay open on the floor. His Dali print was smashed against the couch, and the wall where its melted watches had once rested was especially white. Someone had torn the place apart.

“Dr. Wintrob?” a voice asked.

He spun around with clenched fists, and almost punched his secretary Val in the chest. Then he took a

breath, felt his mouth to make sure the mask was still there, and pretended to be calm. “Yes, Val,” he said.

Instead of a rubber band–clasped ponytail, her hair hung loose around her face. “I wanted to say good-bye. I called your wife. She told me you’d be here,” Val said. “You were my boss for seventeen years, you know?”

“I know,” he said.

Val held her arms wide as if hoping for a hug, but he didn’t come any closer. Instead of khaki trousers, she was sporting skin-tight jeans. When civilizations fell, it was the small social mores that frayed first. Men stopped wearing suits, women started showing their bellies. Walls were tumbling all around him, and in his mind he heard his Victorian groan from within. Val nodded at the mess in his office. “They stole Albert’s files Friday night. I couldn’t stop them. The CDC people, I mean, though I don’t think they were all CDC. A few looked like regu- lar army. My cousin’s a sergeant, so I’d know.”