The Missing (31 page)

“What did they want with Albert?” Fenstad asked.

Val shrugged. “I’m going to sneak across the border to Canada. I have family there,” she said. “There’s no gas at the Puffin Stop, but I figure I can siphon some if I need it . . . It can’t be that hard, right?”

“Is it better in Canada?” he asked.

She looked at him for a few seconds, and then burst into tears. He opened his arms. It was an automatic re- sponse. No feelings associated with the gesture. He wasn’t ready for feelings just yet. She wept on his chest, and the vibrations tickled his skin. In his mind, a song was playing. The tune was familiar, and it soothed him. His wife, his daughter. They were not against him. They loved him. More importantly, they needed him. But that didn’t change the fact that this virus was spreading like poison ivy. It didn’t dry all the fucking blood on this carpet that was sucking off his shoes.

“I killed . . . him last night,” Val murmured, and at first Fenstad thought she was Meg. Meg had killed him in his sleep, and now he was dead. He was relieved. He could stop worrying now.

Val pulled away from him. “You should know. It’s the smell you want to avoid when they’re infected. That’s how the virus reads your mind. Like . . . a probe. It’s trying to figure out if it wants to live inside you, or eat you.”

“Made for These Times” played softly in his mind. . . .
They say I got brains but they ain’t doin’ me no good. I wish they could . . .

Val was weepy and snotty. Two of his least favorite bodily functions. Her tears were wet against his chest. He was wearing the same clothes as yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. The death scent here was different from the Boston County morgue, where he’d done his clinical rotation. It was electric, and full of copper. He suddenly realized the difference. The human body produces adrenaline when it’s frightened. Like animals in a slaughterhouse, their adrenaline hits the air when they’re cut open. He thought about the dried blood in the hall and something clicked: This place stank of murder.

“Jeremy was such a good kid, you know? I loved him so much,” Val said. He patted her back. A tune played in his mind ( . . .
Sometimes I feel very sad . . .
), and he pictured the sun setting, and hundreds of infected ris- ing up like an army in this very building, and gutting his colleagues like fish.

“They lie when they’re infected. When he came home last night his eyes were black. He told me he hated me but it wasn’t him talking. It was the virus. That’s why I had to take him out,” Val said.

Fenstad blinked, and replayed what she’d just said in

his mind. He thought of Meg, and then Madeline, and finally, David. He said a silent prayer for them:
I’ll never do that to you. Never. Be-okay-be-okay-I-love- you-so-much-be-okay.

“I was right, wasn’t I?” Val asked.

He nodded, because from her expression he under- stood it was what she needed from him. Probably it was why she’d come here looking for him. She wanted abso- lution from someone in authority. It suddenly occurred to him that she’d murdered her son. He was thinking about that when she said good-bye. He told her
Good luck. Take care. Get to Canada safe
.

When she was gone, he sat on his couch for the first time since he’d bought it. There was a view of his desk, and diplomas, and a Winslow Homer seascape on a calm, cloudless dawn. His heart was pounding in his chest, and his blood felt cold and exposed, as if his skin had peeled away. His organs were turning to liquid, and pooling inside his groin.

He thought about Meg, and the ways he might mur- der her. Like idle masturbation, the thoughts were com- forting. She’d done nothing wrong. He knew that. Meg Wintrob wasn’t the problem here. He was suffering from an acute dissociate disorder precipitated by the tide of blood in this hospital that was sucking off his shoes. Still, it felt good to imagine his fingers around Meg’s throat. Her skin was thinning with age, and would be soft in his hands.

When he got home he would have to tell her what was happening, not just at the hospital, but inside his mind. For her own safety, she needed to know that he was falling apart. He pictured doing this, and the way she would raise a single eyebrow, like he’d just an- nounced that his real name was Tinker Bell.

It was after ten a.m. when he looked at his watch again. He’d been sitting for so long that his feet were numb. For a second he thought the carpet had sucked them into the floor, along with his shoes. But that was crazy, right? He laughed aloud. The laugh echoed in the empty room, and it sounded like a ghost laughing. This hospital had to be full of them. Was he dead, too?

He thought of a solution, and it seemed like a fine one. He left his office and found the supply room down the hall. He popped open a bottle of the opiate Oxy- Contin, and crushed one of its pills between his teeth. The feeling tingled and then warmed his stomach.

He climbed the stairs, even though it wasn’t the way out. “I want to go home now,” he whispered as he walked. The room was locked from the outside, and the hall was red with dried blood. He didn’t see any bodies. Funny, where were the bodies?

She was sitting up in the bed, fully dressed with her lipstick applied, waiting for him. She didn’t turn to face him when he opened the door. “Dr. Wintrob,” she said.

“Lila.” He smiled widely, like the world was wine and roses. His whole gullet was numb. This stuff was better than cocaine. While he talked, he popped an- other in his mouth. “How’s my favorite patient feeling today?”

“Fine.” She looked at him without flinching. The gauze on her bandage was torn, and the wound was bleeding again. She licked the blood, then looked up at him and explained. “I don’t want them to catch the scent.”

This made sense, so he nodded. He remembered bones on his lawn, and the smell of murder, and his secretary confessing that she’d murdered her own son. (
They get

hungry when they’re sick, Fennie. They eat cough syrup and bones and fish
.) Best to think about it later, though. He’d go mad if he thought about it now. Already, he wasn’t sure if he was crying. Wasn’t sure if Lila was be- ing polite, and keeping silent about his leaky eyes. “Shall we try to find your children, now?” he asked.

She shook her head. “They’re not mine anymore.” “Now, Lila. They’re still yours, whether you have

custody or not.”

Her voice was flat, like one of the infected. “I told you. They’re changed.”

He couldn’t argue this point, so he didn’t. “I’m sorry I wasn’t a better psychiatrist. I got cocky. Anyway, I should let you go. There’s no one here to feed you, and it’s the end of the world. Anybody left here is probably infected, and I’m afraid when it gets dark they’ll eat you.”

She watched him, but didn’t say anything.

He continued. “I never said this because it’s against protocol to give opinions, but you should know your ex-husband’s a sonofabitch. You’re all right when you’re not being a phony, though. I’d like to see you work on that.”

He turned and left, but made sure the door stayed open, so she could find her way out if she wanted. It’s important to give people options.

He decided he should leave, too. He’d didn’t like this virus business. Men of reason didn’t encounter such things.
What would Freud do?
he wondered, and stifled a giggle: Maybe Jung was the man to ask. He popped another OxyContin and chewed. Three was his max. Any more, and he could go into heart failure. He let it melt on his tongue, and everything got thick and wet. He was swimming deep under water, a fish without feelings.

He took the back exit, which turned out to be a bad idea. He wasn’t paying attention, and climbed down one level too far. He opened the door to the basement, and found the bones. They were piled high against the incinerator. At first they looked like elegant bricks. They fit together perfectly, a wall of Tinkertoys. He didn’t look again. Once was enough. In the wild, ani- mals do such things to mark their territory, and to keep prey from recognizing where they’ve been. He thought about the way that dogs and cats keep mementoes of their kills like trophies. He thought of Meg, too. In his mind he put her in a safe place where no one could ever touch her. He wrapped his whole family in blankets, and laid them to rest.

Opposite the wall of bones was a large room, en- capsulating what remained of the CDC’s operational base. It was sectioned off by mesh netting. The air was pumped along the ceiling through a network of plastic tubes that he guessed were still powered by the hospital generator, because he could hear them hum. Inside the netting were rows of gurneys. About half were oc- cupied by fifty or so sick or dead patients. Something moved, and his heart pounded numbly in his dead chest. White ghosts picked through the rows, stealing souls. They fluttered like honey bees, gathering the breaths of the infected, one man after another.

He gasped, and in tandem, the ghosts jerked their heads in his direction. Their eyes were dilated, and both licked their lips. One was short, the other tall. Their strides were perfectly matched. Their hips and arms swung drunkenly as they approached. He saw that they weren’t ghosts; they were women in lab coats white as the afterlife.

They stopped short of the netting. Together they ran their fingers along the plastic, as if its touch was

pleasant. The taller woman was holding what looked like a chicken drumstick. She tore the flesh from the bone and chewed noisily. Smack, smack, smack. God, he hoped it was a drumstick.

He looked behind him for a weapon. No scalpels nearby. He wanted to run, but he was afraid to turn his back on them.

They grinned, sparkling white teeth, and he was re- minded of Lois. “You two CDC?” he asked, because who knew, maybe if he reminded them, they’d act like the people they used to be.

The tall one kept chewing. “Lab techs,” the short one said.

“I’m army reserve. They sent me to check up on things. What’s the status?” he asked. He was shaking.

The tall one’s surgical cap slipped off the top of her head to reveal a pale, hairless crown. She sucked on the bone.

“Initial mortality of thirty percent has increased to fifty percent over a period of three days. The rest . . . sleeping,” the short one responded. She was in her early twenties, and had a blue daisy tattooed to her forearm. It was pretty, and he wondered briefly what kind of girl she used to be.

“Origin of virus?”

“Bedford woods,” the tall one spit. Pieces of chicken sprayed against the plastic net. “Which, if you were army, you would know.” He hoped it was chicken; he really did.

The tall woman kicked her bone in his direction. It slid underneath the netting and hit the tip of his sneaker. Then it swiveled a few times, scraping with each revolu- tion against the granite floor. He looked at it, even though he didn’t want to. Then he sighed with such

relief that he almost cried out. It was a cooked chicken leg, after all.

“Any immune?” he asked.

They shook their heads in tandem, and something sank inside him. It might have been hope. But at least he was calm. At least he was full of medicine, so he could see this through without screaming.

“Why’d they leave you behind?” he asked.

“The experiment.” He detected a note of pain in the short, tattooed girl’s voice.

“What experiment?”

The tall woman turned back to her wheezing pa- tients. She pressed her ear against an old man’s heart. Then she licked her lips like she was hungry, and he suspected that the man’s tenure on this earth would be short.

The tattooed woman sneaked up on him. She found the opening and yanked back the netting until they were facing each other. The medicine made him slow. He jumped, but not fast enough. Her hot, stinking breath fanned against his forehead. Her tattoo daisy was gnarled with thick scar tissue near her elbow, where its stem belonged. She’d tried to remove it, he realized. In another life she’d rubbed her skin with sandpaper.

He stepped back, and she stepped forward. Were they dancing? She rattled as she walked, and he saw that her ankle was shackled by a black chain attached to the far wall. He hadn’t noticed it before, but now she pulled on it until no slack was left. It gave her enough room to tend to the patients, but not enough to get out. The sinking thing inside him began to drown. What the hell was this?

“Please,” she said. Her voice was high-pitched, and

alarmingly human. “Did you talk to Major Dwight? I want to go home.”

“I lied,” Fenstad said. “I’m not army.”

“Please,” the woman begged. “Let me go.” She might have been a beauty once. Now only a few strands of hair remained on her scalp, and her skin sagged.

He said it like a question, but he knew it was true. “You got sick, so they didn’t take you with them. They left you here to monitor the others. Both of you,” he said.

The tattooed woman shook her head. She didn’t look at him when she said, “We volunteered to stay be- hind.”

“Then we got sick—” the tall one answered from across the room.

“So we made our own chains—” the short one added.

“Because we didn’t want to hurt anyone—” the tall one finished.

“We’re mostly infected—” “But not all the way—”

“When we’re done we’ll walk on all fours. The way man is supposed to begin, not end.”

“We’ll never be the same.”

The women spoke as if they were one person. As if they were the virus. These pitiful monsters.

The short woman twisted her ankle inside the metal cuff until it bled. It took him a moment before he un- derstood that she was trying to tear her foot off in or- der to break free. “Don’t do that,” he said, and he meant,
Pick the lock instead. Otherwise, you could lose the whole leg
. He also meant,
Don’t do that; it hurts me
.

She dropped her ankle and shouted “I want to go home!” Her voice echoed in the empty hospital, and

he was afraid she would wake the infected, or maybe just the ghosts. The air pump hummed. It was reassur- ing, this mechanical thing. It had no capacity for a soul.

Across the room, the tall woman dropped her chart and charged at him on all fours. Her gait was awkward. Her arms weren’t long enough, and her body wasn’t lean enough. The effect was a shamble. She fell twice as she strode, and got within a few inches of him when the chain yanked her back.